Results by title

102 books match the query 'Florida' and 8 start with s

Sort by

Selling The Dream

The Gulf American Corporation and the Building of Cape Coral, Florida

David Dodrill

University of Alabama Press, 1993

Examining real estate ambition and urban growth in Cape Coral’s creation.

The Gulf American Corporation played a significant role in the development and urbanization of the state of Florida, especially southwest Florida, during the late 1950s and 1960s. The Miami-based company promoted living in Florida to people residing throughout North America and in several foreign countries. It also enabled people of average incomes to purchase home sites in Florida on an installment basis. As a result, Gulf American had a heavy influence on the migration of people to Florida as early as 1957.

Leonard and Julius J. Rosen of Baltimore, Maryland, founded and controlled the corporation during its 12-year existence from 1957 to 1969. The sale and promotion of Florida real estate was an extension of their marketing style developed in previous years when they sold mail-order cosmetics and other products. Their innovative sales strategies ultimately resulted in conflicts with state and federal regulatory agencies in the mid 1960s over the firm’s aggressive sales methods. The struggle with the state of Florida over regulation, which degenerated into a personal conflict between Governor Claude Kirk and the Rosens, resulted in the Rosens’ selling the business to GAC Corporation of Allentown, Pennsylvania, in 1969. After a series of business setbacks and continuing accusations of misrepresentations by salespeople, GAC declared bankruptcy in 1975 and was eventually resurrected as Avatar Holding, Inc., in 1980.

Gulf American left a mixed legacy to the state of Florida by building several growing cities like Cape Coral and Golden Gate, while at the same time selling worthless underwater swampland near the Everglades. The building of their first development was planned by the company. In that sense, Cape Coral was designed to be the Rosens’ most elaborate sales tool.

Based on 31 personal interviews with former Gulf American Corporation, GAC/Avatar Holding company officials and supplemented by articles from 25 different newspapers, this book provides a comprehensive and fascinating look at the Gulf American Corporation—the largest land sales firm in the United States in the 1960s. In many ways the story of Gulf American is a rags-to-riches tale of Leonard and Julius (Jack) Rosen, complete with intrigue and the fluctuations of fortune that matched the rising tides that covered much of the land they sold.

[more]

Shame and Endurance

The Untold Story of the Chiricahua Apache Prisoners of War

H. Henrietta Stockel

University of Arizona Press, 2004

Many readers may be familiar with the wartime exploits of the Apaches; this book relates the untold story of their postwar fate. It tells of the Chiricahua Apaches’ 27 years of imprisonment as recorded in American dispatches, reports, and news items: documents that disclose the confusion, contradictions, and raw emotions expressed by government and military officials regarding the Apaches while revealing the shameful circumstances in which they were held.

First removed from Arizona to Florida, the prisoners were eventually relocated to Mount Vernon Barracks in Alabama, where, in the words of one Apache, "We didn’t know what misery was until they dumped us in those swamps." Pulmonary disease took its toll—by 1894, disease had killed nearly half of the Apaches—and after years of pressure from Indian rights activists and bureaucratic haggling, Fort Sill in Oklahoma was chosen as a more healthful location. Here they were given the opportunity to farm, and here Geronimo, who eventually converted to Christianity, died of pneumonia in 1909 at the age of 89, still a prisoner of war. In the meantime, many Apache children had been removed to Carlisle, Pennsylvania, for education—despite earlier promises that families would not be split up—and most eventually lost their cultural identity.

Henrietta Stockel has combed public records to reconstruct this story of American shame and Native endurance. Unabashedly speaking on behalf of the Apaches, she has framed these documents within a readable narrative to show how exasperated public officials, eager to openly demonstrate their superiority over "savages" who had successfully challenged the American military for years, had little sympathy for the consequences of their confinement. Although the Chiricahua Apaches were not alone in losing their ancestral homelands, they were the only American Indians imprisoned for so long a time in an environment that continually exposed them to illnesses against which they had no immunity, devastating families even more than warfare. Shame and Endurance records events that ought never to be repeated—and tells a story that should never be forgotten.

[more]

Song of Tides

Tom Joseph

University of Alabama Press, 2008

Beginning with their battle against the forces of Ponce de Leon, the Calusa Indians of southwest Florida entered a dark period of European invasion and native resistance, which changed the nature and course of life on the North American continent.

Song of the Tides is a work of anthropological fiction that is set during the period of the Spanish entrada into southwest Florida and their encounters with the Calusa. Relying on letters and memoirs, especially those of explorer Pedro Menendez de Aviles, shipwrecked captive Escalante Fontaneda, and the Jesuit priest Juan Rogel, Joseph has woven a tale of vivid historical detail and compelling human drama. Working with Calusa scholars, the author has created a superbly written account of the clash of two proud and dominant cultures. Told through the voice of Aesha, daughter of the great Calusa chief Caalus, as well as those of other political and spiritual leaders, the fictional narrative spans half a century of conflict with Spanish soldiers and Jesuits, infighting between bands, struggle to preserve their culture, and eventual defeat of the Spanish through wit and deceit.

[more]

Southern Discomfort

Women's Activism in Tampa, Florida, 1880s-1920s

Nancy A. Hewitt

University of Illinois Press, 2001

Linked to the Caribbean and southern Europe as well as to the Confederacy, the Cigar City of Tampa, Florida, never fit comfortably into the biracial mold of the New South. Nancy A. Hewitt explores the interactions among distinct groups of women--native-born white, African American, Cuban and Italian immigrant women--that shaped women's activism in the vibrant, multiethnic city.

Hewitt emphasizes the process by which women forged and reformulated their activist identities from Reconstruction through the U.S. declaration of war against Spain in April 1898, the industrywide cigar strike of 1901, and the emergence of progressive reform and labor militancy. She also recasts our understanding of southern history by demonstrating how Tampa's triracial networks alternately challenged and re-inscribed the South's biracial social and political order.

[more]

Space

A Memoir

Jesse Lee Kercheval

University of Wisconsin Press, 2014

Jesse Lee Kercheval opens her story in Cocoa, Florida, in 1966 as a precocious ten-year-old whose family—father, mother, two little girls—is trying to ride the Space Race’s tide of optimism. But even as the rockets keep going up, the Kercheval family slowly spirals down.

[more]

Suing for Medical Malpractice

Frank A. Sloan, Penny B. Githens, Ellen Wright Clayton, Gerald B. Hickson, Dougl

University of Chicago Press, 1993

Medical malpractice suits today can result in multi-million-dollar settlements, and a practicing physician can pay $100,000 or more annually for malpractice insurance. Some complain that lawyers and plaintiffs are overcompensated by exorbitant judgments that add to the rising cost of health care. But there has been very little evidence to show whether these arguments are true. In this timely work, six experts in health policy, law, and medicine study nearly 200 malpractice claims to show that, contrary to popular perceptions, victims of malpractice are not overcompensated and our legal system for dealing with malpractice claims is not defective.

The authors survey claims filed in Florida between 1986 and 1989 by people who suffered permanent injury or death during birth or during treatment in an emergency room. How often did illegitimate claims result in financial awards? What was the relation between the injury and the amount the patient lost economically? How much did the plaintiffs actually recover? How did the claimants choose their lawyers and what kind of relationship did they have?

Contrary to common perceptions, in the majority of cases the claims were merited, and the authors found that claimants were on average substantially undercompensated—only about one-fifth of plaintiffs recovered more than their economic loss caused by injury or death. The evidence in this book suggests that placing dollar limits on malpractice cases is unjustified and that our tort system is not so faulty after all.

[more]

Sunbelt Diaspora

Race, Class, and Latino Politics in Puerto Rican Orlando

By Patricia Silver

University of Texas Press, 2020

2021 — Silver Medal, Raul Yzaguirre Best Political/Current Affairs Book – International Latino Book Awards, Latino Literacy Now

An in-depth look at an emerging Latino presence in Orlando, Florida, where Puerto Ricans and others navigate differences of race, class, and place of origin in their struggle for social, economic, and political belonging.

Puerto Ricans make up half of Orlando-area Latinos, arriving from Puerto Rico as well as from other long-established diaspora communities to a place where Latino politics has long been about Cubans in Miami. Together with other Latinos from multiple places, Puerto Ricans bring diverse experiences of race and class to this Sunbelt city. Tracing the emergence of the Puerto Rican and Latino presence in Orlando from the 1940s through an ethnographic moment of twenty-first-century electoral redistricting, Sunbelt Diaspora provides a timely prism for viewing how differences of race, class, and place play out in struggles to claim political, social, and economic ground for Latinos.

Drawing on over a decade of ethnographic, oral history, and archival research, Patricia Silver situates her findings in Orlando’s historically black-white racial landscape, post-1960s claims to “color-blindness,” and neoliberal celebrations of individualism. Through the voices of diverse participants, Silver brings anthropological attention to the question of how social difference affects collective identification and political practice. Sunbelt Diaspora asks what constitutes community and how criteria for membership and legitimate representation are negotiated.

[more]