Finding Florida

Over its long history, Florida has been many things: an Edenic realm protected by geography; a wilderness that ruined Spanish conquistadors; a place to start over; and “god’s waiting room.” With a native population as high as 900,000 (who all died), it became a pestilential backwater with a few thousand inhabitants, but today is our fourth most populous state, with nineteen million people. The site of vicious racial violence, including massacres, genocide, slavery, and the terrorist campaigns that undid Reconstruction,Florida is now one of our most diverse states, a dynamic multicultural place with an essential role in twenty-first centuryAmerica.

From the very first, however, the story of Florida has been distorted and whitewashed. In Finding Florida, T. D. Allman reclaims this history from the mythologizers, apologists, and boosters. He showsFlorida as it was and is, tracing its history through the pre-Columbian era, and under Spanish, French, and British rule. He describes the American maneuvers to take the territory, and the importation of slavery and racism following Andrew Jackson’s military campaigns, and the terrible violence of the Seminole Wars.Florida became a state in 1845; sixteen years later it would secede.

In Florida, Allman writes, two Civil Wars unfolded: first was the actual war, then came the imaginary one, where brutality and ruin were transformed into a selfless struggle to defend a noble cause that never existed. Reconstruction took dramatic form in Florida, but hope ended in heartbreak, as white supremacists broke a legislative tie with a shotgun blast and returned to power. In the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Florida was sold as a paradise: Palm Beach,Key West, Miami, Tampa, and Orlando boomed, fortunes were won and lost, land was stolen and flipped, and millions came and went.

The product of a decade of research and writing, Finding Florida is a highly original, stylish, and masterful work, the first modern comprehensive history of this fascinating place.

“Finding Florida is fascinating, comprehensive, and accessible to the non-specialist reader. While Allman covers an enormous amount of material—taking Florida from uninhabited swampland to the sidewalk culture of South Beach—he does so in such engaging ways that the reader is never overwhelmed. Indeed, each chapter is in itself a satisfying and illuminating narrative, stock full of vivid characters. Somehow he has managed to pull together a compelling read without sacrificing historical substance, a feat to which many professional historians aspire. His wry voice conveys a point of view that gently pushes readers to understand Florida as an American synecdoche.” —Glenda Gilmore , Peter V. and C. Vann Woodward Professor of History, Yale University

“Manuscripts repeatedly find their way into print that ignore the reality of Florida’s past and, in so doing, skew our understanding of what Florida has been, what it is now, what it’s likely to become, and what that means for everyone. T. D. Allman’s book turns all that on its head. It directly challenges the existing historiography with highly intelligent insight and crafting of narrative in a way that permits the reader to immerse himself in a world far from the expected one. Finding Florida is provocative to the point of daring. Thomas Jefferson claimed a little revolution was needed about every twenty years. Florida and its historiography is long overdue for one.” —Canter Brown, Jr., Professor of History, Fort Valley StateUniversity