Gary R. Mormino

A leading Florida historian explores one of the state’s most consequential eras. It was a time of stunning episodes of boom and bust, an era of extremes, a decade of historic changes that point to Florida’s future. In this book, eminent historian Gary Mormino illuminates early twenty-first-century Florida and its connections to some of the most significant events in contemporary American history. Following Mormino’s milestone work Land of Sunshine, State of Dreams, which details the dynamic history of Florida from 1950 to 2000, Dreams in the New Century explores the state’s tumultuous next chapter, a period that included the Bush v. Gore election, 9/11, the housing bubble and Great Recession, and the election of Barack Obama. During these years the Elián González story engrossed the country, Tim Tebow rose to football fame, and Donald Trump became a Florida celebrity. From hurricanes to Ponzi schemes, red tides, climate change, the “Stand-Your-Ground” gun law, demographic diversity, and more, Florida offered nonstop news fodder that reflected its extraordinary internal trends and its importance in the nation. As Mormino shows, Florida is a place of deep conflicts—North and South, liberal and conservative, newcomer and local, growth and conservation—with histories that can be traced back centuries. In 2000-2010, Mormino argues, these tensions collided to produce a “Big Bang” that will continue to resonate in years to come. Mormino takes stock of this crucible of change and explains the social, cultural, and political intricacies of a state the world struggles to understand. Dreams in the New Century unravels Florida’s complicated recent history in a gripping, informative, and fascinating narrative.

When actions of the past clash with the values of today.Millard Fillmore Caldwell (1897–1984) was once considered one of the greatest Floridians of his generation. Yet today he is known for his inability to adjust to the racial progress of the modern world. In this biography, 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.The last Florida governor born in the nineteenth century and the first to govern in the atomic age, Caldwell was beloved in his time for leading the state through the hard years of World War II. He was wildly successful in a political career that may never be matched, serving as governor, congressman, state legislator, and chief justice of the Florida Supreme Court. He passed important educational reform legislation. But his attitudes toward race and citizenship strike Americans today as embarrassing, if not shocking. He refused to address black leaders by their titles. He argued for segregated bomb shelters. And he accepted lynching as part of the southern way of life.Mormino measures the contributions of Caldwell alongside his glaring faults, discussing his complicated role in shaping modern Florida. In the current debates surrounding public memorials and historical memory in the United States, Millard Fillmore Caldwell is a timely example of one man's contested legacy.

The books in the Florida and the Caribbean Open Books Series demonstrate the University Press of Florida’s long history of publishing Latin American and Caribbean studies titles that connect in and through Florida, highlighting the connections between the Sunshine State and its neighboring islands. Books in this series show how early explorers found and settled Florida and the Caribbean. They tell the tales of early pioneers, both foreign and domestic. They examine topics critical to the area such as travel, migration, economic opportunity, and tourism. They look at the growth of Florida and the Caribbean and the attendant pressures on the environment, culture, urban development, and the movement of peoples, both forced and voluntary. The Florida and the Caribbean Open Books Series gathers the rich data available in these architectural, archaeological, cultural, and historical works, as well as the travelogues and naturalists’ sketches of the area in prior to the twentieth century, making it accessible for scholars and the general public alike. The Florida and the Caribbean Open Books Series is made possible through a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, under the Humanities Open Books program.

"This path-breaking book brilliantly explains the explosive growth of Florida from 2.7 million inhabitants in 1950 to 15.9 million in 2000. It focuses on the diverse people who migrated here; the developers of tourism, beaches, shopping malls, and gated communities; new technology (from air conditioning to the space age); and the impact of this growth and development upon the environment."--James B.Crooks, professor emeritus, University of North Florida"This is the first comprehensive social history of Florida in any of its epochs. A brilliant compilation of data, it will be the standard against which all future such efforts in Florida will be measured."--Michael Gannon, professor emeritus, University of FloridaFlorida is a story of astonishing growth, a state swelling from 500,000 residents at the outset of the 20th century to some 16 million at the end. As recently as mid-century, on the eve of Pearl Harbor, Florida was the smallest state in the South. At the dawn of the millennium, it is the fourth largest in the country, a megastate that was among those introducing new words into the American vernacular: space coast, climate control, growth management, retirement community, theme park, edge cities, shopping mall, boomburbs, beach renourishment, Interstate, and Internet. Land of Sunshine, State of Dreams attempts to understand the firestorm of change that erupted into modern Florida by examining the great social, cultural, and economic forces driving its transformation.Gary Mormino ranges far and wide across the landscape and boundaries of a place that is at once America's southernmost state and the northernmost outpost of the Caribbean. From the capital, Tallahassee--a day's walk from the Georgia border--to Miami--a city distant but tantalizingly close to Cuba and Haiti--Mormino traces the themes of Florida's transformation: the echoes of old Dixie and a vanishing Florida; land booms and tourist empires; revolutions in agriculture, technology, and demographics; the seductions of the beach and the dynamics of a graying population; and the enduring but changing meanings of a dreamstate. Beneath the iconography of popular culture is revealed a complex and complicated social framework that reflects a dizzying passage from New Spain to Old South, New South to Sunbelt.

This illustrated biography of one of the most energetic, corporate builders of the early 20th century traces Fisher's transformation of the swampy, South Florida landscape into a luxurious urban locale.

This work, aimed at general readers and environmentalists alike, offers a dicussion of the formation, development and history of the Everglades, considered by many to be the most endangered ecosystem in North America. It begins with South Florida's geological origins and continues through the 20th century. Charting the effects of human intervention upon the region, the author traces its habitation from Calusas and other native groups to the modern period dominated by agribusiness. In between, he discusses the Spanish contract period, the first efforts to farm the region, the first attempts in the 1880s to drain it, and the era of the ""engineering"" Everglades that was largely created by the State of Florida and the US Army Corps of engineers. He argues that desire to convert the ecosystem to farm use continues to guide American thinking about the region at a tremendous environmental cost. He also contends that agriculture, especially sugar growing, must be abandoned or altered. To buy time for public debate over the final form of a sustainable Everglades, he suggests creation of a park modelled on New York's Adirondack State Park.

One man's vision of a state struggling to remain true to itself. The text mixes new essays with a span of earlier ones, and the Crackers of whom Al Burt tells are men and women from Apalachicola to the Everglades, from Tallahassee to the Keys.

Modern Florida began among a group of Yankee reformers at the end of the Civil War, including Harriet Beecher Stowe and her brother Charles. This book tells the story of the group, and of their designs for a postwar Florida.

Florida served as one of the great meeting grounds of the planet, a place where peoples from Indian America, Latin America, Africa, the Caribbean and Europe converged. This book features essays in both Spanish and English on the influence of the Spanish in Florida from the first explorers to the latest Hispanic migrations into Miami.