Personal Injury Attorneyin Columbia, SC.

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What Should You Do After a Car Accident in South Carolina?

The moments following the crash are often a blur when you're involved in a car accident. However, per South Carolina law, those on the scene must adhere to legal responsibilities and obligations.

First, try to stop your car and ensure it is positioned safely near the scene of the crash. Then, call 911 to report the accident. While most folks go into full-blown panic mode, you need to stay calm so you can process the situation. If you notice that there are injured people, give them "reasonable assistance." Per South Carolina Code of Laws, that could include transporting hurt people to a hospital or calling an ambulance for them.

If you're in a car crash, you need to be prepared to exchange contact information with other drivers at the accident scene. If the person who caused the collision is present, make sure to get their name, phone number, address, and insurance info. If witnesses are present, get their contact info, too, in case our team needs to obtain their account later.

Next, try to piece together how the car crash happened. This is an appropriate time to take photos of the cars, wreckage, and debris. Ask yourself if you think a vehicle failed to follow the rules of the road, like speeding or failing to stop at a stop sign.

Regardless of how minor your injuries may appear and who may be to blame for the accident, get legal advice from Theos Law Firm first before giving any recorded statements or refusing medical care.

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A Personal Injury Attorney in Columbia, SC You Can Trust

Time and again, auto accident victims agree to early settlements provided by insurance companies because the offer seems like a lot. But what if you return to work after recovering from an accident, only for your pain to return?

With adjusters, lawyers, and investigators at their disposal, insurance agencies will do everything in their power to minimize the compensation you deserve. Don't let them pick on you or silence your voice. If you or a loved are victims of a negligent car or truck accident in South Carolina, contact Theos Law Firm today. We have the team, tools, and experience to fight back on your behalf, no matter how complicated your case may seem.

 Family Law Attorney Columbia, SC

To schedule an appointment for your free consultation, contact Theos Law Firm in Columbia today.

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USC to offer course on Taylor Swift. Are you ready for it?

COLUMBIA — The University of South Carolina is entering its Taylor Swift era.The School of Sport and Entertainment Management will offer the course “Life is Just a Classroom: Taylor’s Version” beginning with the Spring 2024 semester, according to Kate Blanton, the professor teaching the course.The class will focus on Swift’s business acumen and her “agency as a woman” in the music industry. Blanton ...

COLUMBIA — The University of South Carolina is entering its Taylor Swift era.

The School of Sport and Entertainment Management will offer the course “Life is Just a Classroom: Taylor’s Version” beginning with the Spring 2024 semester, according to Kate Blanton, the professor teaching the course.

The class will focus on Swift’s business acumen and her “agency as a woman” in the music industry. Blanton and her students will dig into Swift’s storied career, including the re-recording of her songs in order to own her music catalog, branding, social media, tour management and merchandising. And, of course, the class will take some time to study the Swifties, the singer/songwriter’s legion of passionate fans. The students will also plan and host a Swift-themed event at the end of the class.

“She’s changing the way that the music industry works and that’s something I think deserves study,” Blanton told Free Times.

Blanton said the 40-seat class was already full, but has still been receiving emails from students asking to join the upper-level course.

The class is for juniors and seniors only, Blanton said, and is aimed at allowing students to combine all the coursework they’ve had thus far through the “lens of this one particular artist.”

“I really want to serve as a class where we look at all aspects of the consumer experience,” Blanton said. “And there’s gonna be students from the retailing department and hospitality, so we’re going to look at how (Swift’s) concerts impact tourism, and the merchandising aspect.”

The course is offered under Sport and Entertainment Management, but Blanton said much of the program’s electives are sports-focused. “It’s an opportunity for (entertainment) students to use the skills that we’ve learned,” she added.

The course syllabus includes lessons like, “My name is Taylor, and I was Born in 1989,” “Oh my God, she’s insane, she wrote a song about me” and “Sweet like justice, karma is a queen.”

USC joins several universities across the country in offering courses on Taylor Swift, including Harvard University and the University of Florida.

The influx of academic attention on Swift comes on amidst her Eras Tour, a greatest hits tour that’s set to gross a $1 billion and received such rabid attention that the launch of ticket sales crashed Ticketmaster’s website and prompted a federal investigation into the third-party ticket company.

Blanton, a self-proclaimed Swifite hater until about eight months ago, attended the Eras Tour last spring and was converted.

“Being part of this community of inclusiveness and promotion of just women solidarity, it’s just a really cool experience,” Blanton said of her Eras Tour visit.

Swift is one of — if not the — world’s most successful working recording artists with 10 albums, four of which she’s re-recorded to obtain ownership of her masters after they were sold by her former label, Big Machine Records, to manager Scooter Braun.

The move to own her creative works isn’t the first time Swift’s team asserted its business acumen. Since 2007, Swift has copyrighted key phrases popularized through her music and merchandising, owning more than 200 copyrights, according to intellectual property law firm, Michael E. Kondoudis.

Swift’s concerts are quite the spectacle, too. The Eras Tour saw a three-plus hourlong set, where Swift performs tracks from all 10 of her records through a blaze of lights, dancers and stage design. The tour’s massive success culminated in October with a theatrical release of the Era’s Tour concert film, which grossed more than $100 million.

Blanton’s course will lean on Swift’s domination of social media, and students will create their own accounts to learn firsthand how fans, businesses and consumers interact with the singer’s brand.

Live Music Venues in the Midlands

Hear that? It’s the scintillating sound of Columbia’s live music venues beckoning you to a performance you’ll never forget.The concert scene is truly unmatched in our area — from intimate jazz lounges to grand amphitheaters, there’s a stage for any type of tune. To get to know them all, you must do three things: Put your hands in the air, wave ‘em like you just don’t care, then lay your eyes (and ears) on our guide....

Hear that? It’s the scintillating sound of Columbia’s live music venues beckoning you to a performance you’ll never forget.

The concert scene is truly unmatched in our area — from intimate jazz lounges to grand amphitheaters, there’s a stage for any type of tune. To get to know them all, you must do three things: Put your hands in the air, wave ‘em like you just don’t care, then lay your eyes (and ears) on our guide.

Colonial Life Arena | 801 Lincoln St., Columbia

Harbison Theatre | 7300 College St., Irmo

Koger Center for the Arts | 1051 Greene St., Columbia

New Brookland Tavern | 122 State St., West Columbia

The Senate | 1022 Senate St., Columbia

Skyline Club | 100 Lee St., West Columbia

The Venue | 1626 Main St., Columbia

Township Auditorium | 1703 Taylor St., Columbia

USC School of Music | 813 Assembly St., Columbia

Ice House Amphitheater | 107 W. Main St., Lexington

Market on Main | 1320 Main St. #150, Columbia

Palmetto Citizens Amphitheater | Center of Doko Meadows Park, Blythewood

Savage Craft Ale Works | 430 Center St., West Columbia, SC

Steel Hands Brewing | 2350 Foreman St., Cayce

The Aristocrat | 1001 Washington St., Columbia

Chayz Lounge | 607 Meeting St., West Columbia

The Joint at 1710 | 1710 Main St., Columbia

Art Bar | 1211 Park St., Columbia

Breakers Live | 801 Harden St., Columbia

Bill’s Music Shop & Pickin’ Parlor | 710 Meeting St., West Columbia, SC 29169

2024 Presidential Primaries Rapidly Approaching

COLUMBIA, S.C. (December 20, 2023) – As South Carolina gears up for the 2024 Presidential Primaries, the State Election Commission wants to remind everyone of important upcoming dates and deadlines on the horizon. With just a few weeks before voting begins, voters are urged to mark their calendars and educate themselves on the candidates and issues so they can be ready to have their voices ...

COLUMBIA, S.C. (December 20, 2023) – As South Carolina gears up for the 2024 Presidential Primaries, the State Election Commission wants to remind everyone of important upcoming dates and deadlines on the horizon. With just a few weeks before voting begins, voters are urged to mark their calendars and educate themselves on the candidates and issues so they can be ready to have their voices heard.

You can vote in either Presidential Primary, but you can only vote in one:

How can I register to vote?

Already Registered? Update your voter registration information.

Haven’t checked your registration in a while? Check it now to make sure it’s up to date to ensure a smoother voting experience.

There are three ways to cast your ballot.

Vote Early

You don’t have to wait until election day to vote, you can vote at any early voting center in your county during the early voting period. Simply bring your Photo ID and vote just like you would at your polling place on election day.

Vote Absentee

Consider voting absentee if you are unable to vote in person. Qualified voters can vote absentee by mail. Get your absentee application at scVOTES.gov or contact your county voter registration office. To learn more about absentee voting go to scVOTES.gov or download the Absentee Go-To-Guide.

Vote on Election Day

Bring your Photo ID to your polling place in your precinct. Your precinct and polling place are also listed on your voter registration card, however, your polling place may have changed since the card was issued. Always check your polling place at scVOTES.gov before leaving to vote.

Download our Voter/Absentee Go-To Guides to help you Prep for the Polls. To find results and more information on voter registration and elections visit scVOTES.gov. Keep up with us on Facebook, Instagram andX/Twitter.

How did Columbia become the state capital? WIS Explains

COLUMBIA, S.C. (WIS) - Historians say virtually none of modern day Columbia would be what it is without the giant stone building in the middle of it all — the state house.So, why Columbia? Why did early settlers choose this stretch of land?“There was a lot of work to get to where we’re currently sitting,” State House Tour Office and Gift Shop Manager Becca Rhinehart said.Centuries of work, really.Columbia as we know it today is full of life with bustling businesses, higher education and the...

COLUMBIA, S.C. (WIS) - Historians say virtually none of modern day Columbia would be what it is without the giant stone building in the middle of it all — the state house.

So, why Columbia? Why did early settlers choose this stretch of land?

“There was a lot of work to get to where we’re currently sitting,” State House Tour Office and Gift Shop Manager Becca Rhinehart said.

Centuries of work, really.

Columbia as we know it today is full of life with bustling businesses, higher education and the meeting ground for all things “South Carolina politics.”

It was all the result of a very tedious plan.

“Columbia is the nation’s very first planned state capitol,” Rhinehart explained. “So, from its origins to the execution of the planning, this was the first of its kind in America.”

Planned, meaning nearly every decision about the new city’s layout revolved around the state house.

Columbia was comprised of roughly 40 streets with each one named with purpose.

“Columbia was outlined as a two mile square. we have our wonderful city blocks, we can still navigate today, and the state house was in the center of it,” Rhinehart said. “We’ve kept the bulk of our street names since the origins, our north-south streets were named after people and the east-west were named after imports. So, there would have been things like blossom lumber, that sort of thing.”

Whaley Street was originally named “Indigo” Street after South Carolina’s second most important export crop in the eighteenth century.

Other examples are Laurel Street, named after laurel plants, and Blossom Street named after cotton blossoms.

Today, you’ll notice Washington Street is adjacent to Lady Street.

Washington Street was named after future president George Washington and Lady Street, after First Lady Martha Washington.

“They had planned for growth of their brand new capital,” Rhinehart said.

Yes, she said brand new capital — meaning Columbia wasn’t the original. So how did we get here?

We have to go back to the colonial times before S.C. was even an official state.

“Really, you would want to go back to the 1660s,” Historian, S.C. Department of Archives and History Dr. Edwin Breeden said.

In 1660, after years of civil war in England, Charles III re-claimed the thrown.

In exchange for their loyalty, the new king gifted a plot of land to eight noble men known as “the Lords proprietors.”

They called the land “Carolina” — a word taken from the Latin word “Charles or Carolus” — honoring King Charles.

To profit off their new land, the men created a government.

“The city of Charleston, or as it was originally known, Charles Town, was founded. and when it was established, it was the capital of a new English colony called Carolina,” Breeden said.

Charleston was the first settlement in the colony of Carolina and the first capitol up until the late 1700s.

Tt was here that Carolinians would take care of administrative duties — such as filing property deeds or making laws — but it wasn’t perfect.

“With the colony encompassing that large of an area. distance was one of the biggest challenges,” Breeden said.

“Charleston was far away from pretty much everyone else in the state,” Rhinehart said. “So, from Greenville to Charleston in the 1700s was quite a long haul by horse.”

It would have taken a week to travel that far by horse and over double that for settlers traveling from what is now North Carolina.

Roughly 150,000 square miles of land governed by just one city.

“There was a recognition really, from very early in the in the colonies history that this was a very large area to manage,” Breeden said.

The decision was made in 1712 to split the swath of land into separate parts: N.C. and S.C.

Now the government in Charleston belonged to only S.C.

After years of protests, the capital was still not in the ideal place for everyone to have equal access.

Therefore, the general assembly sought out a centralized location.

“Some people called Columbia nothing more than a pine forest,” Rhinehart said.

In the early 1700s, historians say Columbia was considered the rural frontier — home to only a few plantations and trading posts — but it quickly became more than that.

“Columbia in the center of the state was chosen with this location, lot due to the river systems here,” Rhinehart said. So, to our west, we have the Congaree River that is made from the Saluda and Broad, and at that time, and the 1700s, that’s as far inland as the boats could go. So, coming from the coast, inland Columbia was the natural drop off point, because the rapids grew too strong, and the rivers are shallow. So, this was a really great point for trade and a central location.”

Columbia had not been officially established by this point. In 1786, the S.C. General Assembly voted to legislate the city into existence.

The empty land was sold to farmers and businesses.

“They took their drawings and plans of the city to charleston, and they would have been near the old exchange building, taking notes and trying to get people to move to Columbia,” Rhinehart said.

After years of recruiting and fundraising, the move from Charleston was officially underway.

The money cooped from selling plots of land was used to build the new state house.

It took three years to complete the new wood capital from 1786 to 1789, but during construction tragedy struck back in Charleston.

“The original state house in Charleston actually had a fire,” Rhinehart said. “Their senate chamber had a fireplace, it got a little out of control, and there goes the whole most of that building. They did rebuild, but they were already on their way to making that new capital in Columbia.”

For nearly a century, the young city thrived building its name as the “new” capital of S.C.

However, in 1865, Union General William T. Sherman and his 60-thousand troops stormed Columbia.

At the time, the fire-proof building, soon to be S.C.’s third state house, was under construction and consisted of basically four stone walls.

Sherman ordered his troops to shell the structure in hopes of destroying it.

“They were across the Congaree River and aiming for the side of our building,” Rhinehart said. “We would have been the tallest thing on the landscape, which made it a really great target.

Next to it, however, was the wooden capital.

On the night of Feb. 16, 1865, it was reduced to ash by Sherman and S.C. was once again left without a functioning state house.

“Through 52 years, we had six different architects, different stages, walls, roof ceiling interior, and by 1907, we have a finished state house,” Rhinehart said.

The colossal structure is comprised of fire-proof materials like bricks made from mud of the Congaree River and the state stone, blue granite, produced in a quarry just four miles from the state house.

In 1990, more than 100 seismic isolators were installed under the building making it earthquake resistant.

“They never could have imagined tour buses and so much rocks, but the city has grown well with us,” Rhinehart said.

A virtually indestructible building resembling the resilience of the Palmetto State and all part of the plan.

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Lockers, once icons of American school life, disappearing from some new SC campuses

COLUMBIA — Many thousands of students who studied in the now-demolished Wando High School buildings in Mount Pleasant spent part of their days walking from class to class, past banks of lockers in their school’s hallways.But the image of lockers in American school life — of teenagers letting gym clothes rot in them, gossiping and perhaps getting shoved into t...

COLUMBIA — Many thousands of students who studied in the now-demolished Wando High School buildings in Mount Pleasant spent part of their days walking from class to class, past banks of lockers in their school’s hallways.

But the image of lockers in American school life — of teenagers letting gym clothes rot in them, gossiping and perhaps getting shoved into them — is slowly disappearing. The students who now attend Lucy Beckham High, opened on the old Wando’s grounds in 2020, don’t have that space to store their books or meet up with friends between periods.

That design choice is part of what school architects say is a trend: district officials prefer to leave banks of hallway lockers out of newly built campuses.

“Maybe 20 years ago, the expectation was that you would put lockers in every single school that you designed,” said Ben Thompson, K-12 studio director at McMillan Pazdan Smith, the South Carolina architecture firm that designed Lucy Beckham and other schools. “Now, it’s rare that you include them in buildings.”

Columbia Education

New campuses for Spartanburg High and Berkeley County’s Philip Simmons High, both recently designed by McMillan Pazdan Smith, also don’t have the traditional banks of hallway lockers. Nor will a new wing of Irmo High outside of Columbia, designed by architecture firm LS3P and almost ready for construction.

The shift is a function of students’ shrinking demand for lockers, as well as the school administrators Thompson works with who often no longer see the point of installing the metal boxes.

He doesn’t remember designing a school within the past five years that has the traditional setup of lockers lining the hallways, though they’re still needed for student-athletes or certain after-school activities.

“The numbers are just so low from the request of students to use (lockers) that it kind of makes you ask the question every single time you go through the design process,” he said. “Do you need the lockers, are they worthwhile to your program, should we include them in the design?”

That shift comes from a shrinking need to carry around as many bulky textbooks as districts move to digital resources and assigning computers or tablets to students, according to Mary Beth Sims Branham, LS3P’s Columbia office leader. Her firm has started installing furniture with hooks for backpacks that students are carrying around instead of stowing in lockers.

A less textbook-focused curriculum was adopted by the Lexington-Richland Five school district, which stopped issuing high school students lockers in 2013 due to the usage of tablets and laptops. The Chapin- and Irmo-area system has stopped installing lockers in non-athletic areas of new school buildings and is removing unused lockers from older campuses, according to a district statement.

“Overall, this reduces construction and maintenance costs and allows the District to more efficiently utilize the building space,” the statement read.

Columbia Education

But the demise of the once-iconic storage spaces prompts questions about student life beyond textbooks.

Lockers served a role in students’ social lives, Kipton D. Smilie, professor of education at Missouri Western State University, stated in an October article. Their absence could mean fewer shared social spaces for kids growing up in an increasingly polarized world.

“This is a social space that’s disappearing, in terms of having to negotiate with people that you don’t know or negotiate with people who maybe you’re uncomfortable with or don’t normally hang out with,” the scholar said. “That locker placement kind of forces those interactions, and now without that, now you can kind of go more to your bubble than maybe in the past.”

Since they were in areas generally less supervised than classrooms or cafeterias, lockers could be a freer space for kids to develop social skills and interact — either for better, by making friends and flirting, or for worse, by bullying. Without that space, Smilie said, today’s students may now just turn to their phones and social media for that interaction, keeping them in their social bubble.

“We may not think much about school lockers beyond their function as containers of students’ books, clothing, and other possessions, but they also serve as containers of a shared social space that is currently disappearing,” he wrote.

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