McLaughlin, J. Michael & Todman, Lee Davis. It happened in South Carolina.

Globe Pequot. 181p. bibliog. index. c2004. 0-7627-2452-8. $9.95. JSA 

From the story of Rebeckah Lee who was brought before a judge in Charles Towne (Charleston) in 1684 for selling a glass of rum without a license to an Indian squaw, to the raising of the submarine Hunley in 2000, this chatty little text chronicles 30 events from the history of South Carolina. The five-to-six-page chapters range over 400 years of the Palmetto State's past, recounting tales of the aristocratic pirate, Stede Bonnet, the slave uprising led by Denmark Vesey, two kinds of "Carolina gold" (rice and the precious metal), the hand-built automobiles of one-time Ford rival John Anderson, the origin of the dance named after the city of Charleston, and even the devastation of Hurricane Hugo. The prose is bright and clear; and there is a brief bibliography and even a "Potpourri of South Carolina Facts." The book suffers, however, from the lack of even a single state map. Patricia Moore, Brookline, MA