Browse by Subject: History

Filled with rare photographs, vintage postcards and advertisements, and fascinating descriptions from over 100 years ago, this book spotlights a little-known time in history when tourists poured into Florida in search of good health. Rick Kilby shows how Florida’s natural wonders were promoted and developed as restorative destinations for America’s emerging upper class.

Once considered one of the greatest Floridians of his generation, Millard Fillmore Caldwell is known today for his inability to adjust to the racial progress of the modern world. Leading Florida historian Gary Mormino tackles the difficult question of how to remember yesterday’s heroes who are now known to have had serious flaws.

For centuries, the southernmost region of the Florida peninsula was seen by outsiders as wild and inaccessible, one of the last frontiers in the quest to understand and reveal the natural history of the continent. This book tells the stories of the explorers and adventurers who—for better and for worse—helped open the unique environment of South Florida to the world.

Journalist, activist, and adventurer, Jane Wood Reno was one of the most groundbreaking and colorful American women of the twentieth century. Told by her grandson, George Hurchalla, this is an intimate biography of a free thinker who shattered barriers during the explosive early years of Miami.

This book is a behind-the-scenes look at the bizarre crime of astronaut Lisa Nowak, who drove 900 miles to intercept and confront her romantic rival in an airport parking lot—allegedly using diapers on the trip so she wouldn’t have to stop. This is a riveting journey inside the high-pressure world of one of America’s most elite agencies and the life of one beleaguered astronaut.

An unparalleled two-hundred-year history of Florida’s highest office, this volume provides the first in-depth examination of all of Florida’s chief executives from the acquisition of Spanish Florida by the United States and the appointment of Andrew Jackson as the territory’s first governor in 1821 to the end of Rick Scott’s tenure in 2019.

Before the high rises, the nightlife, and the fashion scene, Miami’s South Beach was a retirement haven for American Jews. In The Last Resort, photographer Gary Monroe presents a collection of images that preserve his observations of this vanished time.

Featuring one entry per day of the year, this book is a fun and enlightening collection of moments from Florida history. Good and bad, famous and little-known, historical and contemporary, these events reveal the depth and complexity of the state’s past. 

In this narrated cookbook, Adela Hernandez Gonzmart and Ferdie Pacheco memorialize their passion for the Columbia, the nation’s largest Spanish restaurant and Florida’s oldest restaurant. This special 115th anniversary edition of the The Columbia Restaurant Spanish Cookbook features a touching foreword by Andrea Gonzmart Williams, granddaughter of Adela.

The first book to focus exclusively on how—and why—tourism came to define Florida. Offering a concise look at the subject from the 1820s to the present, Tracy Revels demonstrates tourism’s relevance to all other major aspects of Florida history, including the Civil War, the land boom, and civil rights.