Explores the livelihood of the regional antebellum economy surrounding the Apalachicola/Chattahoochee River valley and the resulting global impact of this industry

This study focuses on the port of Apalachicola, Florida and the business men who lived the trade, flourishing amongst the poor conditions of transportation, communication, money, and banking. Cotton businessmen located along the waterway and on the coast neatly divided the labour necessary to market the region's major source of income.

Early regional economics revolved around and grew from the rivers that served as the primary form of transportation, and each patchwork of economy in the antebellum South relied on a different river system and its major transportation artery. Few people truly understand and realize how important cotton was to the world's economy, and no other American export came close to the importance of cotton. This power and success allowed the South to function self-sufficiently, eliminating the need to rely on other regions for goods. It was not until the introduction of the railroad system that these individual river economies blurred and faded into one another, gradually uniting to one integrated national economy.

Demonstrates the passionate interest the Jeffersonian presidents had in wresting land from less powerful foes and expanding Jefferson’s “empire of liberty”

The first two decades of the 19th century found many Americans eager to move away from the crowded eastern seaboard and into new areas where their goals of landownership might be realized. Such movement was encouraged by Presidents Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe—collectively known as the Jeffersonians—who believed that the country's destiny was to have total control over the entire North American continent. Migration patterns during this time changed the country considerably and included the roots of the slavery controversy that ultimately led to the Civil War. By the end of the period, although expansionists had not succeeded in moving into British Canada, they had obtained command of large areas from the Spanish South and Southwest, including acreage previously controlled by Native Americans.
 
Utilizing memoirs, diaries, biographies, newspapers, and vast amounts of both foreign and domestic correspondence, Frank Lawrence Owsley Jr. and Gene A. Smith reveal an insider’s view of the filibusters and expansionists, the colorful—if not sometimes nefarious—characters on the front line of the United States’s land grab. Owsley and Smith describe in detail the actions and characters involving both the successful and the unsuccessful efforts to expand the United States during this period—as well as the outspoken opposition to expansion, found primarily among the Federalists in the Northeast.
 

Finalist for the 2004 National Book Award

Florida is the portrait of the artist as a young woman, an orphan's story full of loss and wonder, a familiar tale told in original language. Alice Fivey, fatherless at age seven, is left in the care of her relatives at ten when her love-wearied mother loses custody of her and submits to the sanitarium and years of psychiatric care. A namesake daughter locked in the orphan's move-around life, she must hold still while the seamstress pins her into someone not her mother. But they share the same name, so she is her mother, isn't she?

Alice finds consolation in books and she herself is a storyteller who must build a home for herself word by right word. Florida is her story, recalled in brief scenes of spare beauty and strangeness as Alice moves from house to house, ever further from the desolation of her mother's actions, ever closer to the meaning of her experience. In this most elegiac and luminous novel, Schutt gives voice to the feast of memory, the mystery of the mad and missing, and above all, the life-giving power of language.

In Florida, fire season is plural, and it is most often a verb. Something can always burn. Fires burn longleaf, slash, and sand pine. They burn wiregrass, sawgrass, and palmetto. The lush growth, the dry winters, the widely cast sparks—Florida is built to burn.

In this important new collection of essays on the region, Stephen J. Pyne colorfully explores the ways the region has approached fire management. Florida has long resisted national models of fire suppression in favor of prescribed burning, for which it has ideal environmental conditions and a robust culture. Out of this heritage the fire community has created institutions to match. The Tallahassee region became the ignition point for the national fire revolution of the 1960s. Today, it remains the Silicon Valley of prescription burning. How and why this happened is the topic of a fire reconnaissance that begins in the panhandle and follows Floridian fire south to the Everglades.

Florida is the first book in a multivolume series describing the nation’s fire scene region by region. The volumes in To the Last Smoke will also cover California, the Northern Rockies, the Great Plains, the Southwest, and several other critical fire regions. The series serves as an important punctuation point to Pyne’s fifty-year career with wildland fire—both as a firefighter and a fire scholar. These unique surveys of regional pyrogeography are Pyne’s way of “keeping with it to the end,” encompassing the directive from his rookie season to stay with every fire “to the last smoke.”

Winner of the Florida Historical Society's 2015 Stetson Kennedy Award

The 1980 Mariel Boatlift was a profound episode in twentieth-century American history, impacting not just Florida, but the entire country. During the first twenty days of the boatlift, with little support from the federal government, the state of Florida coordinated and responded to the sudden arrival in Key West of more than thirty thousand Cuban refugees, the first wave of immigrants who became known as “Marielitos.”
 
Kathleen Dupes Hawk, Ron Villella, Adolfo Leyva de Varona, and Kristen Cifers combine the insights of expert observers with the experiences of actual participants. The authors organize and present a wealth of primary sources, first-hand accounts, archival research, government records, and interviews with policy-makers, volunteers, and refugees that bring into focus the many far-reaching human, political, and cultural outcomes of the Mariel Boatlift that continue to influence Florida, the United States, and Cuba today.
 
Emerging from these key records and accounts is a grand narrative of high human drama. Castro’s haphazard and temporary opening of Cuba spurred many thousands of Cubans to depart in calamitously rushed, unprepared, and dangerous conditions. The book tells the stories of these Cuban citizens, most legitimately seeking political asylum but also including subversive agents, convicted criminals, and the mentally ill, who began arriving in the US beginning in April 1980. It also recounts how local and state agencies and private volunteers with few directives or resources were left to improvise ways to provide the Marielitos food, shelter, and security as well as transportation away from Key West.
 
The book provides a definitive account of the political, legal, and administrative twists on the local, state, and federal levels in response to the crisis as well as of the often-dysfunctional attempts at collaboration between governmental and private institutions. Vivid and readable, Florida and the Mariel Boatlift of 1980 presents the significant details that illuminate and humanize this complex humanitarian, political, and logistical crisis. 

When the first field study of the Florida panther took place in 1973, so little was known about the animal that many scientists believed it was already extinct. During more extensive research conducted from 1981 to 1986, panthers were proven to exist, but the handful of senile, anemic, and parasite-infested specimens that were captured indicated a grim future. During those early years a remarkably enduring image of the panther was born, and despite voluminous data gathered over the next decade that showed the panther to be healthy, long-lived, and reproducing, that earlier image has yet to be dispelled.

For nine years, biologist David S. Maehr served as project leader of the Florida Panther Study Project, helping to gather much of the later, surprisingly positive data. In The Florida Panther, he presents the first detailed portrait of the animal -- its biology, natural history, and current status -- and a realistic assessment of its prospects for survival.

Maehr also provides an intriguing look at the life and work of a field biologist: how captures are made, the intricacies of radio-telemetry tracking, the roles of various team members. He describes the devastating intrusion of politics into scientific work, as he discusses the widespread problems caused by the failure of remote and ill-informed managers to provide needed support and to communicate effectively to the public the goals and accomplishments of the scientists. He examines controversial efforts to establish a captive breeding program and to manipulate the Florida panther's genetic stock with the introduction of relatives from west Texas.

Protection of high-quality habitat, much of it in the hands of private landowners, is the key to the long-term survival of the Florida panther. Unless agency decisionmakers and the public are aware of the panther's true situation, little can be done to save it. This book will play a vital role in correcting widespread misconceptions about the panther's current condition and threats to its survival.

A compendium of Indian-derived names from the three languages of the Muskhogean family—Seminole, Hitchiti, and Choctaw.

The first Native peoples of what is now the United States who met and interacted with Europeans were the people of the lower Southeast. They were individuals of the larger Maskókî linguistic family who inhabited much of present-day Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina, and eastern portions of Tennessee, Kentucky, and Louisiana. Today, sixteen federally recognized tribes trace their heritage from these early Maskókî peoples, and many of them in both Florida and Oklahoma still speak and understand this root language.

The continuing vitality of this core language, and of Seminole culture and influence, makes this linguistic examination by William Read ever more valuable. A companion to his study of Indian Place Names in Alabama, this long out-of-print guide offers a new introduction from Patricia Wickman in which she provides current understandings of Seminole language and derivations and a brief analysis of Read's contribution to the preservation of the Native linguistic record.

Edward Anderson's diary covers his service in Florida Territory from March 16 to December 31, 1844 during the Navy mission in Florida to protect live oak and pine forests on government land from poachers. 

An examination of the understudied, yet significant role of Florida and its populace during the Civil War.
 
In many respects Florida remains the forgotten state of the Confederacy. Journalist Horace Greeley once referred to Florida in the Civil War as the “smallest tadpole in the dirty pool of secession.” Although it was the third state to secede, Florida’s small population and meager industrial resources made the state of little strategic importance. Because it was the site of only one major battle, it has, with a few exceptions, been overlooked within the field of Civil War studies.
 
During the Civil War, more than fifteen thousand Floridians served the Confederacy, a third of which were lost to combat and disease. The Union also drew the service of another twelve hundred white Floridians and more than a thousand free blacks and escaped slaves. Florida had more than eight thousand miles of coastline to defend, and eventually found itself with Confederates holding the interior and Federals occupying the coasts—a tenuous state of affairs for all. Florida’s substantial Hispanic and Catholic populations shaped wartime history in ways unique from many other states. Florida also served as a valuable supplier of cattle, salt, cotton, and other items to the blockaded South.
 
A Forgotten Front: Florida during the Civil War Era provides a much-needed overview of the Civil War in Florida. Editors Seth A. Weitz and Jonathan C. Sheppard provide insight into a commonly neglected area of Civil War historiography. The essays in this volume examine the most significant military engagements and the guerrilla warfare necessitated by the occupied coastline. Contributors look at the politics of war, beginning with the decade prior to the outbreak of the war through secession and wartime leadership and examine the period through the lenses of race, slavery, women, religion, ethnicity, and historical memory.

An exhaustive guide to all aspects of the freshwater mussel fauna in Florida, Freshwater Mussels of Florida covers the ecology, biology, distribution, and conservation of the many species of bivalve mollusks in the Sunshine State. In the past three decades, researchers, the public, businesses that depend on wildlife, and policy makers have given more attention to the threatened natural diversity of the Southeast, including freshwater mussels. This compendium meets the increasingly urgent need to catalog this imperiled group of aquatic organisms in the United States.
 
Each entry in this definitive guide provides a detailed description and multiple depictions of the species as well as select characteristics of its soft anatomy and miscellaneous notes of interest. Individual distribution maps pinpoint the historical and present occurrence of each bivalve species and are just one component of the rich set of 307 mussel and habitat photographs, seventy-four maps, and thirteen tables that illustrate the book. Of particular interest are remarkable electron micrographs of glochidia, the specialized larval life history stage parasitic upon fishes.
 
Freshwater Mussels of Florida will be of lasting value to state and federal conservation agencies as well as other government and nongovernment entities that manage aquatic resources in Florida. The research provides a key baseline for future study of Florida mussels. The survey results in this guide, along with extensive reviews of historical mussel collections in natural history museums, provide a complete picture of the Florida mussel fauna, past and present.