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The Big Watermelon: A Cultural History Of Florida's Brooksville Ridge, Douglas E. Ponticos

USF St. Petersburg campus Master's Theses (Graduate)

The Brooksville Ridge has long been the dominant cultural landscape of westcentral Florida. Though rarely used as a cultural designation today, the region’s landscapes continue to unify a people. More than simply an environmental or geologic region, the Brooksville Ridge was born in a period of colonialism and exuberant extraction for distant markets. Before the Ridge, west-central Florida landscapes, such as Amasura and Withlacoochee, were defined predominantly by local and regional needs. This thesis uses a number of primary and secondary documents to trace the changing cultural landscapes of west-central Florida, from pre-Columbian and Seminole landscapes to the rise of …