Nic Butler, Nicholas Butler, Nicholas M. Butler, Nicholas Michael Butler—take your pick. They’re all legitimate variations of the name to which I answer. That said, however, please don’t confuse me with Nicholas Murray Butler! I don’t claim any relation to him, nor to Rhett Butler, in case you were wondering (and some folks do ask).
I’m an historian, archivist, musicologist, and musician. Although originally from Greenville County, South Carolina, I live and work in Charleston—the city whose history is the focus of most of my work. I have taught courses at the University of South Carolina, Indiana University, and the College of Charleston, but for the past six years have worked primarily as an archivist. After several years at the South Carolina Historical Society, I have been Special Collections Manager at the Charleston County Public Library since the spring of 2005. I enjoy working with the primary documents from which we build our understanding of the past, and helping others locate the historical information they seek. I studied classical guitar with Christopher Berg at the University of South Carolina School of Music before turning to musicology and studying with Georgia Cowart, also at USC. After completing the Ph.D. coursework and exams at Indiana University, I returned to South Carolina to write my dissertation on concert music in early Charleston. 
That work has now been published as a proper book, titled Votaries of Apollo.
Over the past several years I have presented scores of lectures around Charleston on a wide range of historical topics, and delivered scholarly papers at national conventions. In addition to my active role in Charleston’s Mayor’s Walled City Task Force, I’m a member of the Society for American Music, the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, the South Carolina Historical Society, the Charleston Library Society, and Palmetto Archives, Libraries, and Museums Council on Preservation. I still play a bit of guitar, and occasionally I’ve been known to rend the air with the sounds of an Irish bodhran, fife, and snare drum. For the past several years I have been teaching myself to play the Baroque violin, and am now the proud owner of a reproduction of a 1679 Jacob Stainer instrument by Timothy G. Johnson, and a recent H. F. Grabenstein reproduction of a late-seventeenth-century “short bow” (59 cm or 23.25 inches). I’ve had a few lessons with two professional Baroque violinists and a few with a modern player, but the rest has been mostly a personal learning adventure. In the future I hope to be able to present programs describing the dance and fiddle tunes that would have accompanied the Anglo-Celtic colonists who migrated to early South Carolina around the turn of the eighteenth century.
Any questions? You can contact me at nic[at]nicbutler.net or send me a message here:
