Digital Commons Network^™

Murder, Insanity And The Efficacy Of Woman's Role: The Gwendolyn Hoyt Case, George B. Crawford

Florida Historical Quarterly

Shortly before 1 a.m. on 20 September 1957 Gwendolyn Hoyt, a 32-year-old Tampa housewife, lost any semblance of self-possession as she flew into a rage and crushed her husband's forehead and face with a baseball bat. Her subsequent trial for murder initiated a lengthy series of legal proceedings that highlighted the power of a shared assumption about the role of women in U.S. society during the 1950's. Despite the emergence of social, economic and intellectual forces to challenge such a conception, the notion of a legally sanctioned, prescribed woman's role informed the treatment of the case by attorneys, judges and …

Thomas De Saliere Tucker: Reconciling Industrial And Liberal Arts Education At Florida's Normal School For Colored Teachers, 1887-1901, Peter A. Dumbuya

Florida Historical Quarterly

At one and the same time, Thomas de Saliere Tucker's life and career in academia exemplified the triumph of liberty and human rights over slavery in the second half of the 19th century and the difficulty often encountered by those who challenged the long-held notion that equal education could be provided to blacks and whites in separate but equal educational institutions. In 1889 the Florida Superintendent of Public Instruction proclaimed that "it has become a settled policy in the State that competent colored teachers shall be employed to teach the colored children and youth."1 Seven years later, the United States …

William Augustus Bowles On The Gulf Coast, 1787-1803: Unraveling A Labyrinthine Conumdrum, Gilbert C. Din

Florida Historical Quarterly

Colorful William Augustus Bowles has presented problems to historians for as long as they have written about him. He purposely promoted confusion about himself to inflate his personality and achievements, and historians unacquainted with his devious machinations made them worse by repeating them. One egregious error mixed him up with Billy Bowlegs (Holata Micco), a nineteenth-century Seminole chief, and he sometimes was called Billy Bowles, a moniker absent in the multitude of contemporary documents written by and about him.1 The most common mistake describes him as the director general of the Creeks. Though Bowles gained military sway over a group …

Exploring The Regional Traditions Of Fiddling, Anna N. Eyink

Student Theses

During the 1600s, the modern violin traveled from Italy to the British Isles and North America. The instrument became a vital piece of each region's musical culture, and distinct fiddling traditions became established in Ireland, Scotland, Cape Breton, and America. This thesis explores the history of the Irish, Scottish, Cape Breton, Appalachian, and bluegrass fiddling traditions. Additionally, the performance practices of each style are discussed in depth and are related back to the traditional tunes recorded as a part of this project.

She Speaks Her Truth: Black Female Self-Empowerment In African-American Centric Texts, Britt N. Seese

Master of Arts in English Plan II Graduate Projects

A Master's Portfolio that looks into African-American Women in African-American literature and theatrical works.

Florida History In Publications, Florida Historical Society

Florida Historical Quarterly

No abstract provided.

Book Reviews, Florida Historical Society

Florida Historical Quarterly

Ethridge and Shuck-Hall, eds., Mapping the Mississippian Shatter Zone: The Colonial Indian Slave Trade and Regional Instability in the American South. by Julie Anne Sweet; Cashin, Guardians of the Valley: Chickasaws in Colonial South Carolina and Georgia. by Roger M. Carpenter; Shields, ed., Material Culture in Anglo-America: Regional Identity and Urbanity in the Tidewater, Lowcountry, and Caribbean. by Paul G. E. Clemens; Smith and Hilton, eds., Nexus of Empire: Negotiating Loyalty and Identity in the Revolutionary Borderlands, 1760s-1820s. by Andrew K. Frank; Hall, A Faithful Account of the Race: African American Historical Writing in Nineteenth-Century America. By Shawn Leigh Alexander; …

Military Slave Rentals, The Construction Of Army Fortifications, And The Navy Yard In Pensacola, Florida, 1824-1863, Thomas Hulse

Florida Historical Quarterly

In the first half of the nineteenth century, expansion of the abolitionist movement led to increasing pressure on the federal government to substantiate military labor policies in regard to the construction of defense installations and public works projects. The manifestation of this pressure resulted in the passage of a law in 1842 by Congress that required government agencies to account for the use of slave labor. As a result, a "resolution of the House of Representatives lStin stant" forced Navy Secretary A. P. Upshur to respond to questioning on August 10, 1842. When asked "what number of "colored" persons there …

Wetlands And Wildlife: Martin Johnson Heade In Florida, Charlotte M. Porter

Florida Historical Quarterly

During the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, Florida drew the attention of a number of literary figures, naturalists and landscape artists who were vocal in the national conservation movement.1 Often traveling as observers for developers and entrepreneurs, they documented landscapes in words and paintings that now constitute a national treasure. In 1867, Charles Beecher, brother of novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe arrived at the mouth of the St. Johns River. "The river stretched away so boundlessly," he wrote that "it seemed rather [like] a great sea or lake."2 Impressed by the expansive beauty, Beecher described his gateway as a …

A Re-Assessment Of Seminoles, Africans, And Slavery On The Florida Frontier, Kevin Kokomoor

Florida Historical Quarterly

Recently, the focus on slavery within native societies has benfited from a great deal of scholarly attention, and several influential volumes have examined slavery as it existed within a number of southern tribes, including Cherokees, Chickasaws and Choctaws, Creeks, and particularly Seminoles.1 In other studies, historians have focused on the phenomenon of "marronage," experiences that "can be seen to hold a special significance for the study of slave societies."2 Eugene Genovese, for instance, suggested that some Indian communities were "utterly transformed by the entrance of large numbers of blacks," a phenomenon that although not widespread, resonated deeply in the Florida …

Florida Classroom: Tea Sets, Tractors, T-1 Lines: The Survival Of A Small Town Library: The Hastings, Branch Library, Hastings, Florida, Nancy J. Levine

Florida Historical Quarterly

Hastings, Florida, can rightly be called "a wide place in the road." Three miles square, with a population of 687,1 Hastings is the potato capital of Florida, according to its welcome sign. But the town's small size seems to have given it long-lasting feelings of inferiority. Townspeople describe Hastings as "the stepchild of the county." Writing in 1993 to the editorial page of the daily newspaper, the St. Augustine Record, Hastings citizen Bill Parish complained that "[t]he one thing that administrators in St. Johns County like about our area is that beautiful shade of green of our money."

Book Reviews, Florida Historical Society

Florida Historical Quarterly

Lewis, The Spanish Convoy of 1750: Heaven's Hammer and International Diplomacy. by Maurice P. Brungardt; Piecuch, Three Peoples, One King: Loyalists, Indians, and Slaves in the Revolutionary South, 1775-1782. by Richard Durschlag; Knetsch, Fear and Anxiety on the Florida Frontier: Articles on the Second Seminole War, 1835-1842. by Samuel Watson; Shepard, Rationing Justice: Poverty Lawyers and Poor People in the Deep South. by Felicia Kornbluh; Pittman and Waite, Paving Paradise: Florida's Vanishing Wetlands and the Failure of No Net Loss. by Robert Krause; Nichols, Voices of Our Ancestors: Language Contact in Early South Carolina. by S. Lynne Farabee; Finley, Delaying …

Entangled Borderlands: The 1794 Projected French Invasion Of Spanish East Florida And Atlantic History, Robert J. Alderson, Jr.

Florida Historical Quarterly

In 1793-1794 a motley group of South Carolina and Georgia backcountrymen entered into a conspiracy with French revolutionaries to invade Spanish territories in Louisiana and Florida. Although the plot eventually collapsed under pressure from the French and American governments, support for the expedition and resistance to the planned invasion provide a revealing chapter in the history of the southern backcountry and the Atlantic world. The confluence of multi-national, multi-racial constituencies in the heat of revolutionary fervor is ripe for re-evaluation. The most recent examination of the plot was conducted by Michael Morris, who placed the planned invasion of East Florida …

Tampa's 1910 Lynching: The Italian-American Perspective And Its Implications, Stefano Luconi

Florida Historical Quarterly

On 20 September 1910, law enforcement officers in Tampa arrested two Sicilian immigrants, Angelo Albano and Castenge (alias Castenzio and Costanzo) Ficarotta. They were charged with complicity in what ultimately turned out to be the fatal shooting of J. Frank Esterling, an accountant for the Bustillo Brothers and Diaz Cigar Company, a large cigar manufacture that employed some 600 workers in West Tampa. While Albano and Ficarotta were being taken to the county jail, at a time when Esterling was still alive though hospitalized in critical condition, a crowd of twenty-five to thirty people stopped the horsedrawn hack by which …

Book Reviews, Florida Historical Society

Florida Historical Quarterly

DeLatte, Lucy Audubon: A Biography. by Brittany Bayless; Swygert and Vause, Florida's First Law School: A History of Stetson University College of Law by George B. Crawford; Dunkelman, War's Relentless Hand: Twelve Tales of Civil War Soldiers. by Eric P. Totten; Johnson, Souh Women at the Seven Sister Collegs: Feminist Values and Social Activimn, 1871-1915. by Ann Short Chirhart; Cassanello and Shell-Weiss, eds., Florida's Working Class Past: Current Perspectives on Labor, Race, and Gender from Spanish Florida to the New Immigration. by Matthew Hild; Craft, Embry-Rddle at War: Aviation Training during World War II. by Lewis W. Metzger, V; Cattelino, …

Baseball In Key West And Havana, 1885-1910, Gerald E. Poyo

Florida Historical Quarterly

In the midst of the political agitation and heightened nationalist fervor provoked by Fidel Castro's rise to power in Cuba, aged Francisco Andres Poyo, known by his family and friends as Pancho, in early 1961 lay ailing in his Havana home in the Almendares neighborhood. Of his seven children only his daughter Maria, and a trusted housekeeper, remained to attend his needs as he approached his ninetieth year. His wife, Louisa died in 1954 and all his children except Maria had either died or left Cuba. Maria tried to convince her father to leave so not to be alone, but …

Book Reviews, Florida Historical Society

Florida Historical Quarterly

Ash, Finbrand of Liberty: The Story of Two Black Regiments that Changed the Course of the Civil War. by Aaron Sheehan-Dean; Albion, The Florida Life of Thomas Edison. by Mark R. Finlay; Turner, A Journey into Florida Railroad History. by Jesus Mendez; Perez, Jr., Cuba in the Amerian Imagination: Metaphor and the Imperial Ethos. by Jose B. Fernandez; Mills, Peterkin, and McCullough, eds., Coming Through: Vices of a South Carolina Gullah Community from WPA Oral History. by Melissa Walker; Conkin, A Revolution Down on the Farm: The Transfomation of American Agriculture Since 1929. by Claire Strom; Clune, Jr., and Stringfield, …

Florida's Sledd Affair: Andrew Sledd And The Fight For Higher Education In Florida, Carl Van Ness

Florida Historical Quarterly

Andrew Sledd served only briefly as president of the University of Florida from 1904 to 1909. Under constant attack during his short tenure Sledd nonetheless managed to achieve more than many of his successors. The university has never acknowledged his contributions, and his presidency has been largely overshadowed by that of his rival and successor, Albert A. Murphree. Murphree, president from 1909 to 1927, achieved iconic status when a statue was raised in his honor in 1949. The imposing figure of Murphree in academic garb presides eternally in the campus historic district.

Book Reviews, Florida Historical Society

Florida Historical Quarterly

Carmichael, The Last Generation: Young Virginians in Peace, War, and Reunion. by Matthew Hulbert; Inscoe, Race, War, and Remembrance in the Appalachian South. by Brian McKnight; Stebbins, City of Intrigue, Nest of Revolution: A Documentary History of Key West in the Nineteenth Century. by Jonathan Grandage; Pauly, Fruits and Plains: The Horticultural Transformation of America. by Lake Douglas; Kealing, Tupperware Unsealed: Brownie Wise, Earl Tupper, and the Home Party Pioneers. by Minoa D. Uffelman; Dyckman, A Most Disorderly Court: Scandal and Reform in the Florida Judiciary. by Russell Moore; Moruzzi, Havana Before Castro: When Cuba Was a Tropical Playground by …

Selling Education In The Shape Of A Shuttle, Margaret A. Weitekamp

Florida Historical Quarterly

At some point in the early- to mid-1980s, probably in 1983 or 1984 when he was about ten or eleven years old, my younger brother, Raymond, wrote a letter to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), volunteering to be the first child in space. He wanted to fly as a passenger on NASA's Space Transportation System, a vehicle known better as the Space Shuttle. In response, he received a large envelope from NASA stuffed with fact sheets and brochures as well as posters and stickers that soon decorated his bedroom and filled a scrapbook. Although Ray's desire to volunteer …

Book Reviews, Florida Historical Society

Florida Historical Quarterly

Lipscomb, ed. The Letters of Pierce Butler, 1790-1794: Nation Building and Enterprise in the New American Republic. by Rusty Bouseman; Buker. The Metal Life Car: The Inventor, the Impostor, and the Business of Lifesaving. by John Missall; Winsboro. Florida's Civil War: Explorations into Conflict, Interpretations and Memory. by Daniel R. Lewis; Snay. Fenians, Freedmen, and Southern Whites: Race and Nationality in the Era of Reconstruction. by David T. Gleeson; Crawford, Jr. Florida Big Dig: The Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway from Jacksonville to Miami, 1881-1935. by Steven Noll; Warren. If It Takes All Summer: Martin Luther King, the KKK and States' Rights …

Rebranding The Native: Selling The ‘Ideal’ Indigenous Worker At The Carlisle Indian Industrial School, 1879-1918, Luke Prior

History & Classics Student Scholarship

Luke Prior ’22
Major: History/Secondary Education
Faculty Mentor: Dr. Alexander Orquiza, History and Classics

The Carlisle Indian Industrial School sought to recreate the image of the Native American from the savage brute of the past and the lazy free-loader who lived off the government ration to an ‘ideal’ worker who was a productive member of the American economy. In doing so, the school stripped students of their cultures and replaced them with American ideals. A very small minority of those at Carlisle used what they learned to fight against the assimilationist mission of the school.

Little Women, Little Houses: Authorship And Authority In Louisa May Alcott And Laura Ingalls Wilder, Katia Savelyeva

Departmental Honors & Graduate Capstone Projects

Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women and Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House novels, share a place in the canon of American children’s literature as novels centered on female protagonists coming of age within an emblematic period in American history, respectively the duration and aftermath of the Civil War and the post-Homestead Act settlement of the Western frontier. Each text portrays the intertwined processes of girlhood and nationhood through the eyes of rebellious, gender-nonconforming protagonists, Jo and Laura, who each undergo an arc towards starting a traditional family and immersing themselves in normative national projects (respectively a philanthropic school for the poor, …

“A Meaningless Institution”: Allen Ginsberg And The Struggle To Resist Dehumanization, James Altman

Far West Popular Culture Association Annual Conference

This presentation details how in poems such as “A Meaningless Institution,” “Howl,” and “American Change” Allen Ginsberg depicts individuals striving as best they can to maintain their freedom, especially freedom of thought in the face of lockstep conformity. In doing so, they seek to hang onto and reassert their humanity. In virtually every line, Ginsberg’s ideas about free speech, democracy, patriotism, inclusiveness, the environment, and community collided with the dehumanizing ideals of mainstream Cold War America. Ginsberg’s reverence for the United States as celebrated by his artistic “father” Walt Whitman functions as the catalyst for him to protest what the …

"Of Backstories And Epiphanies And Such: A Formalist's Analysis Of Dallas Jenkins' Youtube Series 'The Chosen.'", Richard Logsdon

Far West Popular Culture Association Annual Conference

Of Backstories and Epiphanies: A formalist’s analysis of Dallas Jenkin’s The Chosen

In this essay, I attempt a formalist’s analysis of YouTube sensation The Chosen, so far a two part, sixteen-episode series about Jesus. In taking a formalist’s approach to this series, I seek the unifying principle holding the episodes of The Chosen together and determining the selection and arrangement of parts.

Presented from perspective of Jesus’ followers, the series' episodes make use of backstories and epiphanies to convey the unifying message that Jesus Christ was God and man. Those who experiences the epiphanies, often occurring in backstories intended to …

When First We Practice To Deceive: The Semiotics Of The Chinese Tv Drama The First Half Of My Life, William M. Kirtley

Far West Popular Culture Association Annual Conference

Abstract

In the darkest days of the pandemic, an online streaming service offered escape in the form of a 42-episode Chinese dramatic TV series, The First Half of My Life (2017).

This paper provides a history of semiotic thought followed by an analysis of a woman’s professional life in the Peoples Republic of China. It uses, Canadian Sociologist Irving Goffman’s concept of dramaturgy and Austrian social psychologist Fritz Heider’s balance theory. This popular series is the story of the paradigmatic transformation of its female heroine, Luo Zijun, from dependent housewife to independent businessperson. Her ex-husband declares, “I never imagined …

An Unread Colonial Diary, Brigid Mcevoy

History & Classics Student Scholarship

Brigid McEvoy ’23
Majors: History and Spanish
Minors: Business and Innovation and Latin American Studies
Mentor: Dr. Adrian Weimer, History and Classics

Through funding from a Veritas Research Grant, I deciphered the Shelton shorthand writing of the second volume of Michael Wigglesworth's diary, digitized through the New England Hidden Histories project. Wigglesworth was a famous poet and preacher in early New England. One of the chief purposes of deciphering this second volume was to create a more nuanced perspective on Wigglesworth's life and artistic career.

This diary, written from March 1658 through November 1687, includes both longhand and shorthand writing. …

Book Reviews, Florida Historical Society

Florida Historical Quarterly

Matthews. Caribbean Slave Revolts and the British Abolitionist Movement by Ryan D. Groves; Mulroy. The Seminole Freedmen, A History by Daniel S. Murphree; Latimer. 1812 War with America by James Cusick; Cimbala and Shaw, editors. Making A New South: Race, Leadership, and Community after the Civil War by Robert A. Taylor; Sheehan-Dean. Why Confederates Fought: Family and Nation in Civil War Virginia by John Sacher; Savitt. Race and Medicine in Nineteenth-and Early-Twentieth Century America by John David Smith; Ayala and Bernabe. Puerto Rico in the American Century: A History Since 1898 by Guadalupe Garcia; Spencer. A History of Gambling in …

In The Aftermath Of The Battle Of Olustee: A Beecher's Surprise Visit To Florida, Sarah Whitmer Foster

Florida Historical Quarterly

Isabella Beecher Hooker spent March 12-14, 1864, visiting senior army officers in Jacksonville. The timing was auspicious, given that her visit came just weeks after the only significant Civil War battle in Florida. The Federal defeat at Olustee had occurred on February 20. Moreover, she had access to regimental and brigade commanders through her brother, James C. Beecher, and her Hartford friend and neighbor, Joseph R. Hawley.1 At the end of her visit Isabella wrote to her husband offering observations about the battle and the Federal officer who led Northern troops in this engagement. The source of her information about …

"If It Was Not For You I Would Be Willing To Die:" The Civil War Correspondence Of Michael And Sallie Raysor, Aaron Sheehan-Dean

Florida Historical Quarterly

Like many Floridians before the Civil War, Michael O. Raysor was not a native.2 Born in Colleton District, South Carolina in 1837, he moved to Florida in 1858 at the age of 21. Raysor settled into life in Jefferson County, Florida, relying on the large extended family that moved to the area as well.3 In June 1861, Raysor enlisted in the Jefferson Rifles (Company H) of the 3rd Florida Regiment. Raysor's military service encompassed many experiences common to Confederates. He accompanied Braxton Bragg in his invasion of Kentucky, where he was captured at the battle of Perryville. After being exchanged, …