Florida History and Culture – serie

After its Peruvian discovery in 2002, Phragmipedium kovachii became the rarest and most sought-after orchid in the world. Prices soared to $10,000 on the black market. Then one showed up at Marie Selby Botanical Gardens, USA, where every year more than 100,000 people visit. They come for the lush landscape on Sarasota Bay and for Selby's vast orchid collection, one of the most magnificent in the world.The collision between Selby's scientists and the smugglers of Phrag. Kovachii, a rare ladyslipper orchid hailed as the most significant and beautiful new species discovered in a century, led to search warrants, a grand jury investigation, and criminal charges. It made headlines around the country, cost the gardens hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations, and led to tremendous internal turmoil.Investigative journalist Craig Pittman unravels this tangled web to shine a spotlight on flaws in the international treaties governing trade in endangered wildlife--which may protect individual plants and animals in shipping but do little to halt the destruction of whole colonies in the wild.The Scent of Scandal unspools like a riveting mystery novel, stranger than anything in Susan Orlean's The Orchid Thief or the film Adaptation. Pittman shows how some people can become so obsessed--with beauty, with profit, with fame--that they will ignore everything, even the law.

Most people have never imagined the often dicey, comical, and sometimes bizarre job of a Florida game warden. Backcountry Lawman tells what it’s like to catch an armed poacher in the act - alone, at night, without backup or a decent radio to call for help. These stories describe the cat-and-mouse games often played between game wardens and poachers of ducks, turkeys, hogs, deer, gators, and other species. Few people realize that ""monkey fishing"" - electrocution of catfish - had the same outlaw mystique in the rivers of Florida as moonshining once did in the hills of Georgia and Tennessee.

For centuries, men dreamed of cutting a canal across the Florida peninsula. Intended to reduce shipping times, it was championed in the early twentieth century as a way to make the mostly rural state a center of national commerce and trade.Rejected by the Army Corps of Engineers as ""not worthy,"" the project received continued support from Florida legislators. Federal funding was eventually allocated and work began in the 1930s, but the canal quickly became a lightning rod for controversy.Steven Noll and David Tegeder trace the twists and turns of the project through the years, drawing on a wealth of archival and primary sources. Far from being a simplistic morality tale of good environmentalists versus evil canal developers, the story of the Cross Florida Barge Canal is a complex one of competing interests amid the changing political landscape of modern Florida.Thanks to the unprecedented success of environmental citizen activists, construction was halted in 1971, though it took another twenty years for the project to be canceled. Though the land intended for the canal was deeded to the state and converted into the Cross Florida Greenway, certain aspects of the dispute - including the fate of Rodman Reservoir - have yet to be resolved.

The first book devoted to the history of African Americans in south Florida and their pivotal role in the growth and development of Miami, Black Miami in the Twentieth Century traces their triumphs, drudgery, horrors, and courage during the first 100 years of the city's history. Firsthand accounts and over 130 photographs, many of them never published before, bring to life the proud heritage of Miami's black community.Beginning with the legendary presence of black pirates on Biscayne Bay, Marvin Dunn sketches the streams of migration by which blacks came to account for nearly half the city’s voters at the turn of the century. From the birth of a new neighbourhood known as "Colored Town," Dunn traces the blossoming of black businesses, churches, civic groups, and fraternal societies that made up the black community. He recounts the heyday of "Little Broadway" along Second Avenue, with photos and individual recollections that capture the richness and vitality of black Miami's golden age between the wars.A substantial portion of the book is devoted to the Miami civil rights movement, and Dunn traces the evolution of Colored Town to Overtown and the subsequent growth of Liberty City. He profiles voting rights, housing and school desegregation, and civil disturbances like the McDuffie and Lozano incidents, and analyses the issues and leadership that molded an increasingly diverse community through decades of strife and violence. In concluding chapters, he assesses the current position of the community--its socioeconomic status, education issues, residential patterns, and business development--and considers the effect of recent waves of immigration from Latin America and the Caribbean.Dunn combines exhaustive research in regional media and archives with personal interviews of pioneer citizens and longtime residents in a work that documents as never before the life of one of the most important black communities in the United States.

Guy Bradley, born in Chicago in 1870, was killed in 1905 only three years into his tenure as game warden in a south Florida that was still very much a frontier. His murderer, never prosecuted, was a one-eyed former Civil War sharpshooter who made his living supplying exotic plumage for women's hats. At the time, an ounce of feathers was worth more than an ounce of gold. Bradley's death sent shock waves across America and helped give impetus to the burgeoning environmental movement.

Like so many midwesterners since, Julia Daniels and Charles Scott Moseley moved to Florida in the 1880s seeking a warmer climate. This collection of Julia's letters--mainly to her husband, who made frequent business trips north, and to her close friend Eliza Slade--reveals the struggle of a cultured, urban woman adjusting to the hardship and isolation of life in pioneer Florida.And then coming to love it. Tramping through the unsullied land surrounding the Limona community near Tampa, where they settled, she gloried in her "neglected corner in the Garden of Eden," where she "could look up fifty feet and see air plants growing on the branches of great oaks and hundreds of ferns nodding . . . in the sunlight and gray moss moving through the trees like mist." "Think of me gazing up among crane's nests with redbirds in my own oaks," she wrote. "Even in the nighttime, a mocking bird often sings to me of all the beautiful things I love."Julia (herself a published writer) selected these unedited letters and copied them for her family into a thick leather book. Like characters in a novel, the friends and relatives she describes crackle with personality: a flamboyant Russian proclaims his version of communism, a New England spinster counters with Utopian visions, and a university professor retreats from the ivory tower to agricultural experimentation. Readers observe Julia's flair for making daily life cheerful and they meet the couple's two adored sons and Scott's children by an earlier marriage, as well as Cracker settlers, cattle runners, and assorted seekers of health or wealth.An artist, Julia created a distinctive home designed and decorated in the manner of the pre-Raphaelites. Her palmetto fiber wall covering was exhibited at the Chicago World's Fair in 1893 and survives today. The Florida house, named The Nest, is on the National Register of Historic Places. Accompanied by 71 photographs of Julia's home and family, these letters transcend the life of one woman to capture the experience and spirit of 19th-century Florida.

The quiet manatee has long been a flash point of frequent environmental debates. It is Florida's most famous endangered species, as well as its most controversial. Manatees appear on hundreds of license plates, attract hordes of tourists, and expose the uneasy relationships between science and the law and between freedom and responsibility like no other animal.As passions have flared and resentments have grown, the battle over manatee protection has evolved into a war, and no reporter has followed the story more closely than Craig Pittman, the first environmental writer to explore the complex history, culture, and science of the controversies and concerns surrounding this remarkable creature.With an abiding interest in the uncertain fate of this unique species, Manatee Insanity provides the first in-depth history of the attempts to provide legal protection for the manatee. Pittman follows Florida’s gentle giants through time and space, detailing interactions with a variety of human actors, from Jacques-Yves Cousteau to Jeb Bush to Jimmy Buffett, from a popular children's book author to a federal lawman who dressed in a gorilla suit for the ultimate undercover assignment.

Two individuals who shaped the development of one of Florida'smajor urban centersWhenthey married in 1900, Frank and Ivy Stranahan began a life together on theFlorida frontier that would shape and define the development of one of thestate's most sophisticated urban centers. Pioneering spirit and economicenterprise linked them to Seminole Indians, venture capitalists, and colorfulentrepreneurs along the New River settlement; today they're recognized as afounding family of Fort Lauderdale and their riverfront home has been restoredand designated a National Historic Landmark.Frank Stranahan came south from Ohio in 1893 to run an overnight camp on thestagecoach line carrying passengers from Lake Worth to the Miami area. He soonopened a trading post that thrived on commerce in pelts, plumes, and hides withSeminole Indians, who in turn purchased goods and groceries to take back totheir camps in the Everglades. Stranahan's business interests expanded toinclude real estate and banking. An honest businessman, he became a respectedpolitical and civic leader, instrumental in the birth of Fort Lauderdale in1911. When the Florida land boom collapsed and his bank closed, Stranahan'smental and physical health failed, and he committed suicide in 1929.IvyCromartie, a native Floridian, was 18 when she arrived at the settlement as itsfirst schoolteacher and met her future husband. Energetic and articulate, shefocused her activities outside the home. Besides teaching, she was active in avariety of reform movements ranging from Audubon Society efforts to save theplume birds to temperance and women's suffrage, working mainly through theFlorida Federation of Women's Clubs. She is best remembered for her role as anadvocate for Indigenous American rights—especially education and childwelfare—primarily with the Friends of the Seminoles, an organization sheestablished in the 1930s. Before her death in 1971 she spoke frequently abouther full life to reporters and historians and was interviewed extensively byKersey.

How the unique island city came to be a major tourist destinationKey West lies at the southernmost point of the continental United States,ninety miles from Cuba, at Mile Marker 0 on famed U.S. Highway 1. Famous forsix-toed cats in the Hemingway House, Sloppy Joe’s and Captain Tony's, JimmyBuffett songs, body paint parade "costumes," and a brief secessionfrom the Union after which the Conch Republic asked for $1 billion in foreignaid, Key West also lies at the metaphorical edge of our sensibilities.Howthis unlikely city came to be a tourist mecca is the subject of RobertKerstein's intrepid new history. Sited on an island only four miles long andtwo miles wide, Key West has been fishing village, salvage yard, U.S. Navybase, cigar factory, hippie haven, gay enclave, cruise ship port-of-call, andmore. Duval Street, which stretches the length of one of the most unusualcities in America, is today lined with brand-name shops that can be found inany major shopping mall in America.Leavingno stone unturned, Kerstein reveals how Key West has changed dramatically overthe years while holding on to the uniqueness that continues to attract touristsand new residents to the island.

America’s Fortress offers a compelling narrative of the people who envisioned, constructed, and garrisoned this important military installation . . . Reid brings to life the human experience of the fort that pulsated inside the enduring walls of brick and mortar.”—Peter S. Carmichael, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, author of The Last Generation: Young Virginians in Peace, War, and ReunionKnown as the “American Gibraltar,” Fort Jefferson, located in the Dry Tortugas, Florida, was the most heavily armed coastal defense fort in United States history. Perceived as the nation’s leading maximum-security prison, the fort also held several of the accused conspirators in the Lincoln assassination. America’s Fortress is the first book-length, architectural, military, environmental, and political history of this strange and significant Florida landmark. This volume also fills a significant gap in Civil War history with regard to coastal defense strategy, support of the Confederacy blockade, the use of convicted Union soldiers as forced labor, and the treatment of civilian prisoners sentenced by military tribunals. Reid argues that Fort Jefferson’s troops faced very different threats and challenges than soldiers who served elsewhere during the war. He chronicles threats of epidemic tropical disease, hurricanes, shipwrecks, prisoner escapes, and Confederate attack. Reid also reports on white northerners’ perceptions of slaves, slavery, and the emerging free black soldiers of the latter years of the war. Drawing on the writings of Emily Holder, wife of Fort Jefferson’s resident surgeon, Reid is the first to offer a female perspective on life at the fort between 1859 and 1865. For history buffs and tourists, America's Fortress offers a fascinating account of this little-known outpost which has stood for over 150 years off the tip of the Florida Keys.

The definitive biography of the famous developer of Miami BeachIn the booming early years of the 20th century, few entrepreneurs rivaled Carl Fisher (1874-1939) for sheer energy and imagination. Born in Indiana, he began as a bicycle racer and salesman, made his first fortune perfecting and marketing the automobile headlight, helped build the Indianapolis Motor Speedway and headed promotion of the Indy 500, and was a moving force behind the development of the Lincoln and Dixie highways, America’s first improved transcontinental roads. But all of these accomplishments were only prologue to his grandest adventure, as primary developer and promoter of Miami Beach.This definitive biography of Fisher, abundantly illustrated and written in an engaging style, captures the headiness of the period. Mark Foster traces Fisher’s transformation of the South Florida landscape into a tourist’s dream of golf, polo, deep sea fishing, and luxury hotels and his animation of that dream with bronzed lifeguards, bathing beauties flashing new swimsuit styles, and visiting dignitaries who generated a stream of tantalizing headlines.Foster also treats Fisher’s troubles with labor and with Miami businessmen, his attempted development of Montauk on Long Island, New York, and the collapse of the entire Fisher enterprise in the wake of the 1926 hurricane and the great stock market crash of 1929. Throughout, he sets Fisher’s insights, triumphs, loves, and shortcomings into the context of the early 20th century.This biography of a great corporate builder reveals the emergence of a new American way of life. The man whose genius for promotion turned a swampy spit of land into a luxurious urban locale also framed aspirations of leisure and entertainment for generations of Americans.

The story of how NASA transformed Florida's East Coast over half a centuryFlorida’s Space Coast tells the compelling story of America's half century in space exploration, from the successful launch of the first two-stage rocket in 1950 through the latest space shuttle missions of 2000. Told from the unique viewpoint of the people who built the Spaceport, this book shows how the space program transformed the east central Florida coast from a traditional citrus production and tourist area to one of the most influential high-tech centers in the nation.Cape Canaveral was chosen as a missile launch site because of its many geographical advantages. However, in the early years of the space program, the area was far from an ideal place for NASA employees to raise their families. NASA brought in thousands of space-related workers, who, besides sending machines and men into space, had to meet the challenge of moving their families from urban environs to a rural southern county. This book engagingly recounts the parallel stories of the establishment of America's space program and its impact on the development of Brevard County.

Florida Historical Society Harry T. and Harriette V. Moore Award A history of the cultural tourism activities of the Florida Seminoles In the early twentieth century, the Florida Seminoles struggled to survive in an environment altered by the drainage of the Everglades and a dwindling demand for animal hides. This revised and expanded edition of The Enduring Seminoles, now updated with a new preface, discusses the cultural tourism activities of the Seminoles over the decades that followed. By the 1930s almost all of the Florida Seminole population was engaged in the tourist market. They participated in fairs and expositions in Chicago, New York, and Canada. In large commercial Seminole villages in Miami and Ocala, they sewed brightly colored patchwork, wrestled alligators, and opened their palm-frond chickees to the public. Their exhibition economy provided income for families, and today, the Seminole Tribe of Florida and the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians of Florida promote their tourist activities to worldwide markets. Drawing on interviews with many Seminoles and extending to the Seminole Tribe’s purchase of the Hard Rock Café business in 2006, The Enduring Seminoles provides a colorful social and economic history of an unconquered people.

The story of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Charles Beecher in Reconstruction FloridaModern Florida—a world of tourists, retirees from the North, and novel agricultural crops—began among a group of Yankee reformers at the end of the Civil War, including Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and her brother, Charles, who lived in Florida between 1867 and 1885. This book tells the story of the group—and their designs for a postwar Florida—with the action, atmosphere, and insight of a good novel.Arriving in Florida nearly two decades ahead of Henry Flagler, the Beechers found a wild and inaccessible state with small remnants of a slave economy. As part of the work of Reconstruction, they dreamed of making the state a haven for freedmen and progressive northerners unhampered by the rest of the South’s racial divisions. Settling near Tallahassee and Jacksonville, they worked with Florida’s First Lady, Chloe Merrick Reed, to better education, religion, economics, social and racial relationships, and politics, and they were instrumental in the transformation of Jacksonville from a small seaport to a vibrant city.Despite continuing interest in Harriet Beecher Stowe, her years in Florida have remained obscure; even less is known about Charles Beecher during this period. Using fresh materials that have never been recorded by the Stowe Center (a major repository of Stowe’s works), John and Sarah Foster fill an important gap in the lives of these celebrated reformers and shed new light on Florida’s history during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age.