Florida State Books

Huts and History's strengths include the diversity of the authors' perspectives. The esaays are part scholarly approach to Civil War encampments and part sleuthing. Among the many strong essays is "Finding Civil War Sites: What Relic hunters Know, Whate Archaelogists Should and Need To Know." Recommended for graduate library collections and Civil War buffs who spend several weekends a year walking Civil War sites and trails.

Good book to own if interested in identifying North American mosquitoes. Characters in some keys difficult to distinguish at times but still overall easy to use. The only thing that is lacking in this book is individual descriptions of species. Having these would make identification easier. Despite these few short comings, I still highly recommend this book for people working with mosquitoes.

This book is a great guide to finding publicly accessible Indian mound sites in the Atlantic Coast states. This is the first of 5 guides (they've only done one other which was recently been revised and expanded). Be nice if this one is revised as well. Another book on on Indian Mound sites in Florida list a lot of sites this one doesn't. However, this book has a good introductory section on ancient native american cultures, something hard to find.

This is a collection of essays by archaelogists about the Indian societies that inhabited the southeastern United States from about 1500 to 1700. One chapter each is devoted to the Timucua, Guale, Apalachee, Chickasaws, Caddos, Natchez, Quapaw, Cherokee, Upper Creeks, Lower Creeks, and Seminole.

Much of the writing is opaque professorial prose, but the editor reins in the contributors and they generally stay focused on the subject (Indians) rather than embarking on flights of fancy on pet subjects such as "productive intensification" or "diachronic perspective." If you are interested in what the Indians of the southeastern U.S. were like just before or just after their first contacts with Europeans then this is a good book to read.

The most enigmatic paragraph in the book is titled "Editor's Note." In it the editor blandly explains that the most contentious topic in her editing was the use of tribal names in singular or plural form, pointing out that the correct practice "is to use the ethnological singular to indicate plural members of native tribes." She apologizes for any offense that may be given native peoples by departures from this rule. Is this a ponderous joke dressed up in academically correct language? I think it is -- and I applaud the editor's humour, if such is intended. In any case, the Timucua will forgive her as they have been extinct for 300 years.

Wonderful Florida GUDIE book, it is an older reference book of which some of the lodging might be no longer, nevertheless...it tells history of each area which includes all of Florida and sights YOU MUST SEE.
Great Book.

I felt it was a good book and it taught me alot about that county in the early stages of exsistance.

I am moving to Jacksonville soon, and this book was a handy history of Jacksonville in the last half of the 20th century. The book shows how Jacksonville's heritage is that of the rural, blue collar south: conservative Democratic until the 1990s, conservative Republican thereafter.

It points a reasonably distinctive portrait of Jacksonville 50 years ago: uneducated (with no four-year college in 1956), heavily industrial, and so polluted that in 1948, "sulphuric acid droplets in the air began to disintegrate nylon stockings on women on the streets of downtown Jacksonville."

Occasionally, the book is stingy with analysis: for example, it mentions city government's love affair with expressways here and there but fails to address the possible relationship between highways, suburban sprawl, and downtown deterioration.

The book discusses education often, but here too is uncritical of bureaucrats, routinely assuming that more education spending means more education. Although the book occasionally notes that desegregation was not a complete success in Jacksonville, a more complete analysis would have compared Jacksonville to other cities. Is Jacksonville a city where desegregation worked with a few hitches, or one where (as in most northern cities) desegregation ended with an all-black urban school system surrounded by white suburban schools? This book does not answer that question.

The last chapter of the book is focused on Jacksonville's city-county consolidation: but the book's discussion of scholarly commentary is too focused on comparing Jacksonville with Tampa, which has annexed significant swaths of suburbia (as opposed to other cities with more limited annexation powers such as Cleveland or Detroit). Are taxpayers better off because Jacksonville has one city government instead of 20? It is hard to tell from this book.

The paradise of the southeast includes such cities as Charleston and natural areas as the St. Johns River, Cedar Key, and even the "Garden of Eden" in the Florida Panhandle. Fishman covers the more famous explorers such as Audubon, Muir, and Bartram but my appreciation goes to her for introducing me to some of the lesser known naturalists such as Hardy Croom who found new plants such as the Florida Yew, and the explorations of Dr. John Small and his weed wagon botanizing in the Everglades. The nations appreciation should go out to Roland Harper for researching and helping to preserve the Okefenokee Swamp.

Fishman mixes the travels of the naturalist with useful background natural history, and her own trip through the area traversed by the naturalist. Often this provides useful contrasts, but at times was superfluous; did it really add anything to the history to tell us that her car broke down or that the water in the campground shower was too hot? At times she projects her own personal emotions into the historic figure for example of William Bartram "He felt fear and must have sometimes felt a great loneliness". At times she also projects modern sensibility onto the times, for example though we may all now agree that the plan to drain the Everglades was "incredibly stupid", but it would have been more valuable to present an understanding of the culture of the late 1800's to understand this better. Despite these criticisms, I appreciated this book and hope that perhaps she does a follow up of some of the more recent naturalists such as herpetologist Archie Carr or ornithologist Arthur Howell.

I think that this was a very intersesting book for anyone who loves mystery thing. The fact of this book is it is like a buried treasure; the island it self is a treasure. This book is very strange in its way of telling the past, yet it is the same as the present. The sland is a beautiful place and the book mkes it more realistic.

Ken Brooks traces the history of the lowest of the low of the minor leagues in an interesting bit of cultural history which chronicles the Alabama-Florida League. The AFL (936-1962) consisted of cities which in some cases were hardly more than villages in southeast Alabama and northwest Florida. The league spanned the paradigm shifts of World War II and the development of all weather roads, antibiotics, airplane travel, and the disappearance of basefall as a central focus of small town life. The day of these boys of summer on fields of sometimes less than meticulous manicure, of sometimes dingy lights and of single cold shower dressing rooms, was the time of the $.20 cent hamburger, $.20 milk shake, $.20 loaf of bread and the $.20 gallon of gas, and of $250 as a pretty good paying job. It was a pre-TV, pre-air conditioning era when what happened on a summer's eve on a baseball diamond would be the stuff of the next day's conversation in the cafe's and service stations and of the winter's "Hot Stove League". What happened on local league diamonds could be the stuff of memorial comparisons that transcedened decades. It was a time when bicycles were safely left unattended in public places, and cars were routinely parked unlocked with windows down. It was a time when local teams, the leagues in which they played, and the comparitive statistics which accrued were matters of civic and communal consciousness. The viability of the low minors on the terms in which it then existed was a phenoemnon on its way out through displacement by paradigmatic cultural shifts even it reached its peak. There was no reason not to think at the time local baseball interest would not recover from temporary aberrant challenges and carry forth its continuity. The AFL initiated play with teams in places like Troy, Ozark, Enterprise, Dothan, Adalusia, and Union Springs, Al. and Panama City, Fl. From our present perspective, Brooks observes, it is easy to underestimate the importance of a Class D team to towns in the pre-TVA era. Brooks begins his historical portrait with Paul Hemphill's gripping and poignant experiential account of his one game with the Graceville, Fla. Oiliers (1954) Graceville, a village of circa 1,000 population, was the most tiny of all towns in professional baseball in the lowest of the lowest of classifications, but Hemphill's tears had salt which burns through the years with a sting with which those who have in some context similarly felt the devastating nature of undesirable finality can easily emphasize. Brooks follows with a focus on Panama City as a Class D case history. The author includes interviews with more than a dozen persons who lived portions of the league's history. He presents the the statistics, the stadia, the death of a batting star from a beaning which almost destroyed the league, the administrative controversies, the playoffs and the great moments and the peccantries. Class D baseball, even in the lowest league in the lowest of classifications, was important it its own right. It was an integral expression of communal affiliation and association. The players were men who, as Bill James has expressed it, who played baseball. They were playing baseball there and then, and what they did there and then had its own meaning. Team compositions were likely to be composed of minor leaguers on their way down (sometimes as player managers), minor league journeyman whose experienes might span decades and experience in the more exotic places of the high minors, augmented by local coaches, law enforcement personnel, service station operators and novice players from who knows where. While the major leaguers of the era might be reknowed and admired nationally, and the magical creatures who cavorted under the arc lights on the tapesty of green and brown of the picture postcard diamonds of green cathederals like Rickwood Field in Birmingham or Ponce De Leon Park in Atlanta of the prestiguous Southern Association of major deep South metro areas might be reknowned regionally, the Class D ballplayers were equally were the glory of their times locally. In Brook's cultural history we meet men integral to the AFL -- the characters like Bo Belinsky, Bobby Bragan, Lou Pinella; the greats like Virgil "Fire" Trucks, Neal Cobb, Spencer "Onion" Davis; the journemen like Bobby Dews, Wayne Terwilliger, Cal Ripkin, Sr.; the sometimes notables like Bobby Cox, Steve Barber, Steve Dalkowski, Travis Tidwell, or Dixie Howell of the famous Ala. Crimson Tide combination of Howell to Don Hudson. If the last 1940s was the heyday of minor league baseball, it becomes clear by hindsight that even then incipient signs of an irreversible mortality were making themselves apparent. Even in the best of times franchise survivability was an ever present challenge. With the demise of the Class B Southestern League in the early 1950's, larger population centers like Montgomery, Selma and Pensacola replaced the more bucolic AFL entries. Even so, Graceville, Fla. lasted through 1958. By the league's last season (1962), the AFL had outlasted the historic and prestigous "major league of Dixie" (the Southern Association). Of the AFL league entries that last year, Pensacola, Ft. Walton, Selma, Dothan, Montgomery and Adalusia, only the latter had been an original league entrant, and that affiliation had not been consistent. Baseball is a something of seamless web. Persons and events connect with persons and events with an interconectivity of intriguing synchronicity and fortuity that reverberates with indivildual and colelctive memory. There is a sense in which the AFL lives on with memorial viability simultaneously with such displacement as an integral aspect of communal awareness and epxerience that knowledge of the location of the fields on which the leagues teams played has in some instances been lost to memory. Brook's THE LAST REBEL YELL is a graceful portrait of a vanished America. Reading the book is sort of like a diversionary drive on a two lane highway with its horse-shoe motels and neon lighted pre-fast food franchise drive-ins from an era when the highways went through all the towns, wherein in passing through one could see, sense and feel what the countryside was like, and in retrospect can remember how place existed once on such a lost and humane scale.