Michael Gannon, “Michael Gannon’s History of Florida in 40
Minutes” Florida Univ. Press,
2007, 67 pp
In this very short, and somewhat interesting, history of Florida, Gannon presents
thousands of years of history of the state.
He highlights ten watershed periods in the state’s history. The first four of those periods cover nearly
12,000 years and were each shaped by the population and culture of the dominant
inhabitants: the original aborigines, Spanish settlers and missionaries, British
colonists, and finally American settlers.
The next two periods were the early statehood and then the Civil War and
Reconstruction. This was followed by the
Flagler and Plant era; WWII; and finally, the age of air conditioning.
My
Notes:
Pg. 33:
By 1880 the white population of Florida had increased markedly in
number. Sixty-four percent of residents
had been born in the state, a figure never equaled afterward. The major force in launching the state’s
modern tourist industry, now Florida’s largest revenue producer, was Standard
Oil tycoon Henry Morrison Flagler (1830-1913).
In 1888 he built the luxurious Ponce de Leon Hotel in St. Augustine,
then constructed the Florida East Coast Railway south to Miami and Key West.
Pg. 40: The 1920’s runaway land boom in Florida was
more spectacular than the oil and free-land stampedes elsewhere. In 1925 over two and a half million people
came south into Florida, mainly to Dade County, looking for fifty feet in
paradise. The nature administered a coup
de grace in the form of two Atlantic hurricanes, in 1926 and 1928. Still, at the close of the twenties, the
state’s population had increased by nearly half, and nine new counties had been
created.
By 2006 the net
population of Florida increase made it the fourth largest state in the
Union. Florida, today, is a
multicultural society with few parallels elsewhere. (p. 58)
Pg. 66: The years 2004-5 brought six hurricanes in
forty-four days to Florida causing damage in the billions of dollars.
No comments:
Post a Comment