Suggested Reading List
A History of Music and Dance in Florida, 1565-1865
Author: Housewright, Wiley L.
Description: This elegant volume is the first to chronicle Florida's aboriginal and European music and dance from the South's earliest permanent settlement to the end of the Civil War.
Floridians and non-Floridians have often dismissed the state's musical heritage as beginning and ending with Stephen Foster's "Swanee River (Old Folks at Home)." For this volume, music scholar Wiley L. Housewright draws on documents of cultural history largely overlooked by previous researchers to reveal the vast heritage and diversity of 300 years of Florida music and dance.
Housewright examines works written and performed by Native Americans,
European adventurers, backwoods pioneers, slaves, politicians, sailors, soldiers, stevedores, and professional ensembles. His narrative evokes the cultural and political background of music in Florida and the often colorful characters who sang and danced across the stage of the state's history.
This volume encourages a reconsideration of the geographic orientation of American music history, as well as a vivid rediscovery of the richly diverse cultural traditions of early Florida.
Black Society in Spanish Florida
Author: Landers, Jane
Description: The first extensive study of the African American community under colonial Spanish rule, "Black Society in Spanish Florida" provides a vital counterweight to the better-known dynamics of the Anglo slave South. Jane Landers draws on a wealth of untapped primary sources, opening a new vista on the black experience in America and enriching our understanding of the powerful links between race relations and cultural custom. Blacks under Spanish rule in Florida lived not in cotton rows or tobacco patches but in a more complex and international world that linked the Caribbean, Africa, Europe, and a powerful and diverse Indian hinterland. Here the Spanish Crown afforded sanctuary to runaway slaves, making the territory a prime destination for blacks fleeing Anglo plantations, while Castilian law (grounded in Roman law) provided many avenues out of slavery, which it deemed an unnatural condition. European-African unions were common and accepted in Florida, with families of African descent developing important community connections through marriage, concubinage, and godparent choices. Assisted by the corporate nature of Spanish society, Spain's medieval tradition of integration and assimilation, and the almost constant threat to Spanish sovereignty in Florida, multiple generations of Africans leveraged linguistic, military, diplomatic, and artisanal skills into citizenship and property rights. In this remote Spanish outpost, where they could become homesteaders, property owners, and entrepreneurs, blacks enjoyed more legal and social protection than they would again until almost two hundred years of Anglo history had passed.
Fort Mose: Colonial America's Black Fortress of Freedom
Author: Deagan, Kathleen A. and Darcie A. Macmahon
Description: This book tells the story of Fort Mose and the people who lived there. It challenges the notion of the American black colonial experience as only that of slavery, offering instead a richer and more balanced view of the black experience in the Spanish colonies from the arrival of Columbus to the American Revolution.
Henry Flagler - Builder of Florida
Author: Sammons, Sandra Wallus
Description: Follow the rise of Henry Flagler as he changes Florida's east coast with his hotels and his Florida East Coast Railway
Henry Flagler - Visionary of the Gilded Age
Author: Martin, Sidney Walter
Description: Henry Flagler, Visionary of the Gilded Age is the fascinating story of a turn-of-the-century business career. Flagler left home at the age of 14 to seek his fortune and made two. He formed a partnership with John D. Rockerfeller soon after oil was discovered. When asked if the Standard Oil Company was the result of his thinking, Rockerfeller said: "I wish I had the brains to think of it. It was Henry M Flagler." Flagler began his retirement in Florida. He believed in the east coast and created hotels, railroads, communities, model farms and more from Jacksonville to Key West including major development efforts in St. Augustine, Palm Beach and Miami.
Henry Flagler, The Astonishing Life and Time of The Visionary Robber Baron Who Founded Florida
Author: Chandler, David Lean
Description: With an entrepreneurial spirit noteworthy of his immigrant Palatine forebears, Flagler, together with John D. Rockefeller, founded Standard Oil and used his fortune to create the modern state of Florida. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chandler (Criminal Brotherhood, etc.) provides colorful accounts of the early immigrants and the ferment of invention and industry of the mid- and late-1880s to which the Standard Oil empire contributed. After an initial visit to Jacksonville in 1877 because of his first wife's health, Flagler disengaged from the company and at 64 started a second career in Florida as developer of farmland and resort areas, building luxury hotels and railroads which spurred the growth of Fort Lauderdale, Miami, Palm Beach and other cities. Flagler, an elusive personality, remains an enigmatic figure, however, despite his astonishing life as a visionary robber baron recreated here.
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings: A Descriptive Bibliography
Author: Tarr, Rodger L.
Mullet on the Beach: The Minorcans of FLorida, 1768-1788
Author: Griffin, Patricia C.
Description: In the history of St. Augustine, the story of the Minorcans, who still today exert tremendous political and social influence, rivals the drama of the Jamestown or Plymouth settlements. Patricia C. Griffin describes their first twenty years in the New World, including the hardship of their arrival in British East Florida in 1768, their starvation and suffering on an indigo plantation, and their revolt and flight to sanctuary in St. Augustine.
There, survivors of this devastating experience pieced back together their Mediterranean heritage. In time, they became farmers, craftsmen, shopkeepers, mariners, and fishermen. Mullet on the beach, their freedom cry, signaled the emigrants release from plantation captivity. As the Floridas reverted to Spanish control and were later acquired by the United States, the Minorcans became the core population of St. Augustine, settling into a quarter next to the city gate and south of the old Spanish fort which is now known as the restored area.
Griffin brings alive this remarkable colonial venture through her use of documentary sources, archaeological evidence, and topographical and climatic data. Students of Florida history and the Spanish borderlands, specialists in migration studies, ethnohistorians, and the general reader will value this solidly researched study of a folk communitys struggle and triumph in the New World.
The Houses of St. Augustine
Author: Nolan, David, Barrett, Ken and Fitzpatrick, Jean Ellen
Description: Richly illustrated with 15 original watercolors and 180 color photographs to show representative styles and forms. Each chapter covers a separate era in St. Augustine's history and discusses the city's distinctive character during that era as well as how architectural styles evolved. Offers a history of attempts at historic preservation and suggests future remedies.
The Houses of St. Augustine, 1565-1821
Author: Manucy, Albert
Description: Albert Manucy's book continues to serve as a catalyst for architectural preservation in St. Augustine and to inspire similar works elsewhere. His sketches, which explain this colonial architecture, delight as much as they inform. "The book also serves as a gentle reminder to Yankees that Florida was civilized before the Puritans settled New England."--F. Blair Reeves, chairman, Historic Resource Committee, Florida Association/American Institute of Architects. As architecture documents history, The Houses of St. Augustine records architecture, preserving and interpreting the history of housing in the oldest city in the continental United States.
The Negro on the American Frontier
Author: Porter, Kenneth W.
The Oldest City: St. Augustine's Saga of Survival
Author: Waterbury, Jean Parker
Description: Four cultures over more than four centuries contribute to the history of St. Augustine
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