Florida Resources

"Some say that Floridians lack a sense of place--they won't after reading Al Burt."--Ann Henderson, executive director, Florida Humanities Council "Florida starts in the subtropics and slowly rises into the true temperate zone, the geography and all living things taking on different looks as the elevation goes from sea level to hilly, from the central ridge to the beaches, the terrain from desert-like to swampy, the soil from sugar sands and rich muck to red clay. The blossoms change from orchids and frangipani to azaleas and dogwoods, the people from international sophistication to Cracker commonality, the accents from the bobtailed syllables of New York and distinctive fastbreaking Spanish of the Cubans to the mysteries of Haitian Creole and Southern mushmouth (like mine). . . . One winter season, the story goes, an amused snowbird encountered an old Cracker in crowded South Florida. 'Lots of weird people down here,' the snowbird said, patronizingly. 'Yeah,' the Cracker replied, looking him over carefully. 'But they ain't near so many in August as they is this time of year.'" As a roving reporter for the Miami Herald from 1973 to 1995, Al Burt traveled all of Florida, studying it with the insight of a native and the detached eye of the foreign correspondent he had been. During those years, he observed connections with the state's past and speculated about its future, and, while he was at it, took note of the human frailties and heroisms he witnessed every day. Al Burt's Florida is like a family portrait, a loving but not uncritical view of a complex and fascinating state. Burt's portrait combines vignettes of notable Floridians--some famous, like Ed Ball, but most better known locally--with those of the state's many special places: Okeechobee in the teens and twenties, Miami Beach in the fifties (when dinner in Havana was only a $26 plane ride away), Wakulla Springs when it served as Johnny Weismuller's Tarzan movie set, modern-day Tallahassee with its formality and grace. Al Burt himself emerges from this landscape as the remarkable, engaging, and passionate Floridian he is. He takes us in hand, starting from his headquarters in the north Florida scrub, on a tour of the charm, substance, and fantasy that are Florida, yesterday and today. And always, he dwells with greatest affection on the smaller places, the real places, the anchors of old Florida--and on those folks who do their best to preserve them. In the process he captures what few have expressed--a sense of Florida as home. Al Burt worked as a journalist for 45 years, the last 22 of which he spent as a roving Florida columnist for the Miami Herald. The recipient of numerous journalism awards, he has been a freelance contributor to many magazines, including The Nation and Historic Preservation, and is the author of several books, among them Florida: A Place in the Sun (1974) and Becalmed in the Mullet Latitudes (1984). In his honor, the 1,000 Friends of Florida established the annual Al Burt Award for Florida journalism.

"The stories which make up Florida's promoters originally appeared in Florida Trend Magazine."
Hamilton Disston -- Henry Bradley Plant -- Henry Morrison Flagler -- Bion Hall Barnett -- Mrs. [Bertha Honore] Potter Palmer -- David Paul Davis -- Barron Gift Collier -- Carl Graham Fisher -- George Edgar Merrick

This is the first full-length biography of Marjorie Carr, arguably one of Florida's most influential environmental activists, who dedicated her life to the study of science and conserving Florida's wildlife and wild places.

"Traces the long standing effort to build a canal across Florida. The book reveals much about competing visions of progress, economic growth, and environmental preservation in the fragile ecosystem of Florida, as well as the 'ins and outs,' of politics, influence, and power in the Sunshine State. The history of the canal is not just a story of Florida's past, but a compelling lesson for its future."

No single individual did more to promote sea turtle research and conservation than Archie Carr (1909-1987). So entwined did he become with these creatures and the fight against their overexploitation and loss of habitat that the largest wildlife refuge for loggerhead turtles in the world was named in his honor, and World Sea Turtle Day is celebrated internationally on his birthday, June 16. Carr's work with sea turtles began in the 1940s. His many publications written for general readers, including his 1956 classic The Windward Road,alongside numerous articles for National Geographic and other publications, brought widespread attention to the plight of these animals. So Excellent a Fishe, first published in 1967, combined everything the careful researcher had learned in more than two decades of fieldwork. This groundbreaking book answered many then-unresolved questions about sea turtle behavior, including those about their remarkable migrations. In large part because of the endearing charm of Carr's narrative style, it remains a beloved and often-consulted volume in the field.

The journals of early maritime explorers traversing the Atlantic Ocean often describe swarms of sea turtles, once a plentiful source of food. Many populations had been decimated by the 1950s, when Archie Carr and others raised public awareness of their plight. One species, the green turtle, has been the most heavily exploited due to international demand for turtle products, especially green turtle soup. The species has achieved some measure of recovery due to thirty years of conservation efforts, but remains endangered. In The Case of the Green Turtle, Alison Rieser provides an unparalleled look into the way science and conservation interact by focusing on the most controversial aspect of green turtle conservation--farming. While proponents argued that farming green sea turtles would help save them, opponents countered that it encouraged a taste for turtle flesh that would lead to the slaughter of wild stocks. The clash of these viewpoints once riveted the world. Rieser relies on her expertise in ocean ecology, policy, and law to reveal how the efforts to preserve sea turtles changed marine conservation and the way we view our role in the environment. Her study of this early conservation controversy will fascinate anyone who cares about sea turtles or the oceans in which they live.

Lawton Chiles was one of the most inspirational and influential politicians to come from Florida. His unique campaign style and passion for improving people's lives established a legacy that deserves recognition today. John Dos Passos Coggin conducted more than one hundred interviews with the friends, family, and co-workers of Lawton Chiles to create this definitive biography.

Likely to raise hackles among Democrats and Republicans alike, this dynamic history of modern Florida argues that the Sunshine State has become the political and demographic future of the nation. David Colburn reveals how Florida gradually abandoned the traditions of race and personality that linked it to the Democratic Party. The book focuses particularly on the population growth and chaotic gubernatorial politics that altered the state from 1940, when it was a sleepy impoverished southern outpost, to the present and the emergence of a dominant Republican Party. In the twenty-first century, Colburn says, Florida is a dynamic, highly partisan, largely conservative state at the cultural, social, and economic intersection of the Western Hemisphere. But the transition hasn't been entirely felicitous. Allegations abound that the state is a "banana republic" favoring the wealthy, a piece of paradise that embraces "immigrants, natives, seniors, rednecks, evangelicals, and yes, flim-flam artists and mobile home salesmen. All of whom came to the state looking for ways to improve their lot in life." Colburn depicts the state's colorful governors at the center of every postwar development from Cracker to Sun Belt politics, from segregation to integration, from boosterism and modernization to economic and environmental crises. As the story of one of the most influential states in the nation, the book redefines Florida politics.

An examination of the politics of disaster on the local level through the analysis of three levels of incumbent politicians in the aftermath of Hurricane Andrew in South Florida.
*available in print & eBook forms

"In this portrait of a man the Florida House of Representatives eulogized as the "Floridian of the Twentieth Century," Dyckman argues that the courageous moral leadership of LeRoy Collins not only spared Florida the humiliation that befell other southern states under less enlightened leaders but also was responsible for modernizing all the branches of the state government. Collins was elected governor as a segregationist but recognized in office that he could not reconcile segregation with his religious faith or his sworn duty to represent all the citizens of Florida. He announced that racial discrimination was contrary to "moral, simple justice."

"The purpose of this book is to contribute to the understanding of the postwar era by evaluating the gubernatorial administration of one of the New South's most distinguished spokesmen."

Before 1947, when Marjory Stoneman Douglas named The Everglades a "river of grass," most people considered the area worthless. She brought the world's attention to the need to preserve The Everglades. In the new and updated Afterword, Michael Grunwald again tells us what has happened to them since then. Grunwald points out that in 1947 the government was in the midst of establishing the Everglades National Park and turning loose the Army Corps of Engineers to control floods--both of which seemed like saviors for the Glades. But neither turned out to be the answer. Working from the research he did for his book, The Swamp, Grunwald offers an account of what went wrong and the many attempts to fix it, beginning with Save Our Everglades, which Douglas declared was "not nearly enough." Grunwald then lays out the intricacies (and inanities) of the more recent and ongoing CERP, the hugely expensive Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan.

In the first comprehensive biography of Douglas, Jack E. Davis explores the 108-year life of this compelling woman. Douglas was more than an environmental activist. She was a suffragist, a lifetime feminist and supporter of the ERA, a champion of social justice, and an author of diverse literary talent. She came of age literally and professionally during the American environmental century, the century in which Americans mobilized an unprecedented popular movement to counter the equally unprecedented liberties they had taken in exploiting, polluting, and destroying the natural world. The Everglades were a living barometer of America's often tentative shift toward greater environmental responsibility. Reconstructing this larger picture, Davis recounts the shifts in Douglas's own life and her instrumental role in four important developments that contributed to Everglades protection: the making of a positive wetland image, the creation of a national park, the expanding influence of ecological science, and the rise of the modern environmental movement. In the grand but beleaguered Everglades, which Douglas came to understand is a vast natural system that supports human life, she saw nature's providence.
*available in print & eBook forms

This important work for general readers and environmentalists alike offers the first major discussion of the formation, development, and history of the Everglades, considered by many to be the most endangered ecosystem in North America. Comprehensive in scope, it begins with South Florida's geologic origins--before the Everglades became wetlands--and continues through the 20th century, when sugar reigned as king of the Everglades Agricultural Area. Urging restoration of the Everglades, McCally argues that agriculture, especially sugar growing, must be abandoned or altered.

Stories on Florida early this century, portraying the state as a place where men begin new lives rather than end them. Typical is The Mayor of Flamingo, on a man who abandons the city to become a farmer.

"A collection of tales boiling with real estate dealers, egret poachers, rumrunners, mango growers, sportsmen, land grubbers, murderers, and mosquitoes. First printed in The Saturday Evening Post during the 1920s, '30s, and '40s, these stories constitute a rip-snorting glimpse back to a South Florida that now exists only in memory."--Miami Herald "Reflects the same concerns found in her better-known non-fiction work--a fascination with the beauty of Florida and a warning against its imminent destruction."--Tallahassee Democrat The subjects that would fire Marjory Stoneman Douglas's enthusiasm for the rest of her life first appeared in her short fiction published in the 1920s. Florida's most celebrated environmentalist, the author of The Everglades: River of Grass, wrote even then about protecting South Florida's fragile ecosystem and the state's endangered species, about the dangers of short-sighted land development, and about Florida history. The nine stories in this first collection take place in a scattering of South Florida settings--Miami, Ft. Lauderdale, the Tamiami Trail, the Keys, the Everglades--and reveal the drama of hurricanes and plane crashes, of kidnappers, escaped convicts, and smugglers. Editor Kevin McCarthy relates each story to Douglas's life and points out the autobiographical touches which surface frequently in her stories.

A beginner's guide to bird watching in Florida that includes a detailed description, rarity factor, and the best time and place to view each bird in its natural habitat.

Although several people had considered constructing a railroad to Key West beginning in the early 1800s, it took a bold industrialist with unparalleled vision to make it happen. In 1902, Henry Flagler made the decision to extend the Florida East Coast Railway to "the nearest deepwater American port." In this book, renowned Florida historian Seth H. Bramson reveals how the Key West Extension of the Flagler-owned FEC became the greatest railroad engineering and construction feat in U.S., and possibly world, history, an accomplishment that would cement Flagler's fame and legend for all time. Join Bramson as he recounts the years of operation of this great railroad, what it did for the Florida Keys and what it meant to the resident conchs.

This monumental biography tells the story of how one of the wealthiest men in America spared no expense to turn the country's "Oldest City" into a highly desirable vacation destination for the rich. Upon arrival, Flagler found accommodations in St. Augustine to be inferior, so he set out to build the opulent Ponce de Leon Hotel, and thus began his endeavor to attract wealthy travelers to the small southern city. He funded hospitals and churches and improved streets and parks. He constructed railroads in remote areas where men feared to tread and erected palatial hotels on swampland. The rich and famous flocked to Flagler's invented paradise. And he had the vision to stretch his new railroad southward, establishing hotels and accommodations along the way. In tracing Flagler's second career, Thomas Graham reveals much about the inner life of the former oil magnate and the demons that drove him to expand a coastal empire that eventually encompassed Palm Beach, Miami, Key West, and finally Nassau. Graham also gives voice to the individuals that history has forgotten: the women who wrote tourist books, the artists who decorated the hotels, the black servants who waited tables, and the journalists who penned society columns for the newspapers. Arguably no man did more to make over a city--or a state--than Flagler. Almost single-handedly, he transformed Florida from a remote frontier into the winter playground of America's elite. Filled with fascinating details that bring the Gilded Age to life, Mr. Flagler's St. Augustine provides an authoritative look at an intriguing man and a captivating time in American history.

A biography developed by the Flagler Museum from interviews, historical documents, and Martin's original manuscript about the life and time of a Florida icon.

With over 200 fascinating photographs, On Lake Worth illustrates the rich history of the city from its beginning. See its growth from a small settlement around Lake Worth, named for Major General William Jenkins Worth, to a bustling community alive with energy. Join author Beverly Mustaine on a fascinating photographic tour that chronicles the community's past. Discover the city's story, from the early pioneers and their initial movement to the area to Henry Flagler and his dream of turning Palm Beach into a great winter resort. Included are rare photos, most of which are previously unpublished, which highlight significant events throughout the area's history. Images of Flagler's hotels in the early pioneer days, the 1928 hurricane that devastated the area, and scenes of World War II, as seen from the shores of Lake Worth, are revealed in this collection.

"The Highwaymen introduces a group of young black artists who painted their way out of the despair awaiting them in citrus groves and packing houses of 1950s Florida. As their story recaptures the imagination of Floridians and their paintings fetch ever-escalating prices, the legacy of their freshly conceived landscapes exerts a new and powerful influence on the popular conception of the Sunshine State."

The widely collected paintings and inspiring tale of Florida's Highwaymen is now fully revealed in this book which includes, for the first time, works by all 26 artists. Illustrated with 204 full-color plates, The Journey of the Highwaymen traces these painters from the early 1950s through the Civil Rights movement as they captured a vision of Florida as a paradise for new beginnings."

s one of the "original" nine members of the group of entrepreneurial African American regional painters now known as the Highwaymen, and its only woman, Mary Ann Carroll's story is a vivid and interesting journey told in this book.

Monroe presents a collection of paintings by Al Black, an artist who was part of the Highwaymen, a group of self-trained African American painters who sold works out of the trunks of their cars during the 1960s and 70s. In the introduction, Monroe tells the unique story of how Black went to prison for fraud and drug possession but continued to paint landscapes and murals there.

Zora Neale Hurston is regarded as an integral part of the Harlem Renaissance and an important and influential African American writer. This biography takes into account the whole woman, the writer, the philosopher, and the spiritual soul and examines each as it is reflected in her career, fiction and nonfiction publications, and her death.

This exploration of Zora Neale Hurston's life and work draws on a wealth of newly discovered information and manuscripts that bring new dimensions of her writing to light. * 20 critical essays cover the full scope of Zora Neale Hurston's writing * Includes the work of 22 distinguished authors--both established and emerging Hurston scholars drawing on important recent research and discoveries

An intriguing investigation of the famous writer's turbulent final years "'Courage' is the last word that Zora Neale Hurston wrote in her letters. And Hurston's courage is what Virginia Lynn Moylan documents in this moving and meticulously researched account of the end of Hurston's life."--Anna Lillios, author ofCrossing the Creek "Moylan's account of Hurston's last decade contributes to our understanding of a complex artist and individual--one who was pivotal in the creation of the first 'anthropologically correct' baby doll and yet opposed court-ordered desegregation."--M. Genevieve West, author ofZora Neale Hurston and American Literary Culture "Hats off to Virginia Lynn Moylan for filling in missing pieces of Hurston's life story. This sympathetic biography of Hurston's last years is both a lively introduction to her life and a must-have book for Hurston fans. . . . Add[s] heft and richness to our understanding of all that Hurston was up against and just how much she achieved, in spite of the odds."--Carla Kaplan, author of Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters In 1948, false accusations of child molestation all but erased the reputation and career Zora Neale Hurston had worked for decades to build. Sensationalized in the profit-seeking press and relentlessly pursued by a prosecution more interested in a personal crusade than justice, the morals charge brought against her nearly drove her to suicide. But she lived on. She lived on past her accuser's admission that he had fabricated his whole story. She lived on for another twelve years, during which time she participated in some of the most remarkable events, movements, and projects of the day. Since her death, scholars and the public have rediscovered Hurston's work and conscientiously researched her biography. Nevertheless, the last decade of her life has remained relatively unexplored. Virginia Moylan fills in the details--investigating subjects as varied as Hurston's reporting on the trial of Ruby McCollum (a black woman convicted of murdering her white lover), her participation in designing an "anthropologically correct" black baby doll to combat stereotypes, her impassioned and radical biography of King Herod, and her controversial objections to court-ordered desegregation. Virginia Lynn Moylan, educator and independent scholar, is a founding member of the Fort Pierce, Florida, Annual Zora Festival and a contributing author to The Inside Light: New Critical Essays on Zora Neale Hurston.

Two celebrated writers challenged by the color line "In this fascinating and insightful book, Anna Lillios deepens our understanding of the complexity of the friendship between two of America's most beloved Southern female writers."--Virginia L. Moylan, author of Zora Neale Hurston's Final Decade   One of the twentieth century's most intriguing and complicated literary friendships was that between Zora Neale Hurston and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. In death, their reputations have reversed, but in the early 1940s Rawlings had already achieved wild success with her best-selling and Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Yearling, while Hurston had published Their Eyes Were Watching God to unfavorable critical reviews. When they met, both were at the height of their literary powers. Hurston appears to have sought out Rawlings as a writer who could understand her talent and as a potential patron and champion. Rawlings did become an advocate for Hurston, and by all accounts a warm friendship developed between the two. Yet at every turn, Rawlings's own racism and the societal norms of the Jim Crow South loomed on the horizon, until her friendship with Hurston transformed Rawlings's views on the subject and made her an advocate for racial equality. Anna Lillios's Crossing the Creek is the first book to examine the productive and complex relationship between these two major figures. Is there truth to the story that Hurston offered to work as Rawlings's maid? Why did Rawlings host a tea for Hurston in St. Augustine? In what ways did each write the friendship into their novels? Using interviews with individuals who knew both women, as well as incisive readings of surviving letters, Lillios examines these questions and many others in this remarkable book.    

It is the sordid tale of an African-American wife who murdered her white lover on a hot August Sunday in 1952, and the ensuring trial that shook the foundations of the Segregationist South.

In Jump at de Sun, A.P. Porter takes readers on the lonely and exciting road that brought Zora from Eatonville to a place in history.

Stetson Kennedy was born in Jacksonville on October 5, 1916. From 1937 to 1942, Kennedy traveled the cities, towns, and rural backwoods of Florida documenting the cultural heritage of the state's diverse populations for the WPA's Florida Writers' Project. Kennedy later infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan, exposing their secrets. He was an activist for positive social change, working to make life better for all Floridians until his death on August 27, 2011. This book is the first comprehensive look at the life and work of author, activist, folklorist, investigative journalist, and oral historian Stetson Kennedy.

Using thorough and stark statistics, Kennedy describes a South emerging from World War II, coming to grips with the racism and feudalism that had held it back for generations. He includes an all-out Who's Who, based on his own undercover investigations, of the "hate-mongers, race-racketeers, and terrorists who swore that apartheid must go on forever." The first paperback edition brings to a new generation of readers Kennedy's searing profile of Dixie before the civil rights movement.

"A tongue-in-cheek travel guide to the United States as Stetson Kennedy saw it in the 1950s when segregation was still firmly in place and when there were many barriers in housing, education, and job opportunities for blacks, Native Americans, Jews, Puerto Ricans, Mexican Americans, and almost anyone who was not a white Protestant. . . . The Guide was [first] published in Paris in 1956 by Jean-Paul Sartre because the author could find no American publisher who was willing to issue the book. In this new edition, Kennedy has added an afterword that provides his impressions of contemporary 'desegregated racism'."--Florida Historical Quarterly Jim Crow Guide documents  the system of legally imposed American apartheid that prevailed during what Stetson Kennedy calls "the long century from Emancipation to the Overcoming." The mock guidebook covers every area of activity where the tentacles of Jim Crow reached. From the texts of state statutes, municipal ordinances, federal regulations, and judicial rulings, Kennedy exhumes the legalistic skeleton of Jim Crow in a work of permanent value for scholars and of exceptional appeal for general readers.

Author and activist Stetson Kennedy was born in Jacksonville, Florida in1916 and he died there in 2011. This book was the last project he completed. Kennedy was a human rights activist, and author of many books on Florida history and culture. He was head of the Florida Writers Project unit on folklore, oral history, and socio-ethnic studies between 1937 and 1942, resulting in the classic book Palmetto Country. Following World War II, Kennedy infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan, an experience he detailed in the book The Klan Unmasked. In this newly compiled and edited work, Stetson Kennedy offers a fresh perspective on this collection of Florida slave narratives and their relevance to contemporary society.

"Allen W. Trelease's White Terror, originally published in 1971, was the first scholarly history of the Ku Klux Klan in the South during the Reconstruction period, and based as it is on massive research in primary sources, it remains the most comprehensive treatment of the subject. In addition to the Klan, Trelease discusses other night-riding groups, including the Ghouls, the White Brotherhood, and the Knights of the White Camellia. He treats the entire South state by state, details the close link between the Klan and the Democratic party, and recounts Republican efforts to resist the Klan."

Stetson Kennedy's infiltration and exposure of the KKK.

This book tells a group of intertwining stories that culminate in the historic 1947 collision of the Superman Radio Show and the Ku Klux Klan. It is the story of the two Cleveland teenagers who invented Superman as a defender of the little guy and the New York wheeler-dealers who made him a major media force. It is the story Ku Klux Klan's development from a club to a huge money-making machine powered by the powers of fear and hate and of the folklorist who--along with many other activists-- took on the Klan by wielding the power of words. Above all, it tells the story of Superman himself--a modern mythical hero and an embodiment of the cultural reality of his times--from the Great Depression to the present.

Zephaniah Kingsley is best known for his Fort George Island plantation in Duval County, Florida, now a National Park Service site, and for his 1828 pamphlet, A Treatise on the Patriarchal System of Society, that advocated just and human treatment of slaves, liberal emancipation policies, and granting rights to free persons of color. Paradoxically, his fortune came from the purchase, sale, and labor of enslaved Africans. In this penetrating biography, Daniel Schafer vividly chronicles Kingsley's evolving thoughts on race and slavery, exploring his business practices and his private life. Kingsley fathered children by several enslaved women, then freed and lived with them in a unique mixed-race family. One of the women--the only one he acknowledged as his "wife" though they were never formally married--was Anta Madgigine Ndiaye (Anna Kingsley), a member of the Senegalese royal family, who was captured in a slave raid and purchased by Kingsley in Havana, Cuba. A ship captain, Caribbean merchant, and Atlantic slave trader during the perilous years of international warfare following the French Revolution, Kingsley sought protection under neutral flags, changing allegiance from Britain to the United States, Denmark, and Spain. Later, when the American acquisition of Florida brought rigid race and slavery policies that endangered the freedom of Kingsley's mixed-race family, he responded by moving his "wives" and children to a settlement in Haiti he established for free persons of color. Kingsley's assertion that color should not be a "badge of degradation" made him unusual in the early Republic; his unique life is revealed in this fascinating reminder of the deep connections between Europe, the Caribbean, and the young United States.

Anna Kingsley's life story adds a dramatic chapter to histories of the South, the state of Florida, and the African Diaspora. Both an American slave and a slaveowner and possibly an African princess. Anna was captured as a teenager in Senegal in 1806 and sold into slavery. Zephaniah Kingsley, Jr., a planter and slave trader from Spanish East Florida, bought her in Havana and took her to his St. Johns River plantation, where she soon became his household manager, his wife, and eventually the mother of four of his children.

James Oliver Horton chooses thirteen historic sites to explore the struggles and triumphs of African Americans and how they helped shape the rich and varied history of the United States.

"Recounts a time when range wars, cattle drives, rustling, street brawls, and rum running were commonplace in Florida. Though the focus is on Mizell, Tinsley also gives an engaging history of Florida and the cattle industry."--Tampa Tribune

An elegantly illustrated collection of forty-nine traditional tales from the Sunshine State.

"Braden's research draws upon architectural plans and archival resources, as well as memoirs and accounts written by Gilded Age visitors and employees, to re-create the experience of Florida's winter resorts. Floor plans and abundant illustrations--many never before published--make this book a richly visual documentation that will appeal to architectural historians, preservationists, and general readers curious about Florida's pioneering tradition of exotic escape and the resplendent structures in which it was born."

Prior to its incorporation in 1855, Tampa Town--as it was then known--was a desolate place to live, and disease and isolation kept many from settling in the area. But as the century progressed, a new and exciting mode of transportation began to open up America's remaining frontiers, including the untamed Gulf Coast of Florida. When the railroad came to Tampa, thousands of adventure-seekers, tourists, and new residents came with it, all ready to soak up the balmy breezes and tropical pleasures of the city of Tampa. Tampa began to resemble a modern industrialized city by the turn of the century, due mainly to the grand vision and plans of one man. Henry B. Plant encouraged Tampa's growth by bringing the railroad to town and constructing the elaborate Tampa Bay Hotel, and he, along with other entrepreneurs, brought an economic boom to the region with new industries, such as cigars and citrus, and the promotion of tourism.

The vivid description of her friend Zelma Cason in Rawlings' 1942 autobiographical work Cross Creek so enraged Cason that she instituted a suit against the author seeking $100,000 in damages for violating her right to privacy, a cause of action that had yet to be recognized in the state of Florida.

"Idella Parker's recollections of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings are as intimate and frank as their ten years together. This long-awaited memoir, by the black woman who was cook, housekeeper, and comfort to the famous author from 1940 to 1950, tells two stories--one of their spirited friendship, the other of race relations in rural Florida in the days before integration."

"Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings grew up loving to write and hoping to become an author. Later she moved to Florida, where she lived out in the country at Cross Creek in an area called the Big Scrub. She met the people who lived there, the so-called Crackers. Their simple way of life fascinated her, so she wrote stories about them. One of her books, called The Yearling, was about a boy and a pet deer. This book won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Her dream of becoming a famous writer had come true."

"Using interviews with individuals who knew both women, as well as incisive readings of surviving letters, Lillios examines these questions and many others in this remarkable book."

"Betty Mae Tiger was born in 1923 to a Seminole Indian mother and a French trapper father, a fair-skinned half-breed who was nearly put to death at age five by tribal medicine men. She became the first formally educated Florida Seminole, attending a government boarding school in Cherokee, North Carolina, where at age fourteen she learned to speak English. Her autobiography is the story of the most decorated member of the Seminole Tribe of Florida - a political activist, former nurse, and alligator wrestler, who today has her own web site."