Books on Florida

Recently I produced a list of books to help a couple of people understand modern Florida and the state's history. The Olin Library has a superb Florida studies collection and this is just a short list. Sorry for the weird citations but they came from our catalog. I can't pretend to have read them all. I have briefly annotated those that I have. What titles would you add? Leave a comment.

Belleville, Bill, 1945- Losing it all to sprawl: how progress ate my Cracker landscape

Colburn, David R. From yellow dog Democrats to red state Republicans: Florida and its politics since 1940.

Cruickshank, Helen G. editor. William Bartram in Florida 1774: the adventures of the Great American naturalist, explorer, artist.

Davis, Jack E., 1956- Making waves: female activists in twentieth-century Florida

Douglas, Marjory Stoneman. The Everglades: river of grass.

An extensive and poetic history of the Everglades from Florida’s Rachel Carson.

Faherty, William Barnaby, 1914- Florida's space coast: the impact of NASA on the Sunshine State.

Foglesong, Richard E., 1948-. Married to the mouse: Walt Disney World and Orlando

Gannon, Michael, 1927- Florida: a short history

Grunwald, Michael, 1970- The swamp

An environmental history of the Everglades that manages to tell the history of the state at the same time.

Hiaasen, Carl. Paradise screwed: selected columns of Carl Hiaasen edited by Diane Stevenson.

Hiaasen, Carl. Skinny dip: a novel

It may be fiction, but once you live in Florida it doesn’t seem like it.

Hurston, Zora Neale. Their eyes were watching God.

Hurston’s novel about the impact of the Hurricane of 1928 on the African Americans living south of Lake Okeechobee.

MacDonald, John D. (John Dann), 1916-1986. Condominium: a novel

Maurice O’Sullivan. The Florida reader: visions of paradise from 1530 to the present.

Mormino, Gary Ross, 1947- Land of sunshine, state of dreams: a social history of modern Florida.

Mormino has so much to tell that his book comes across as an abstract. It reads like a list, but what an amazing list.

Murphree, Daniel S. Constructing Floridians: Natives and Europeans in the colonial Floridas, 1513-1783

Ortiz, Paul, 1964- Emancipation betrayed: the hidden history of Black organizing and white violence in Florida from

Rawlings, Marjorie Kinnan, 1896-1953. Cross Creek.

She wrote The Yearling. This is her memoir of her years on an orange grove in rural North Florida. Funny, but reflects the racial thinking of its time and place.

Ortiz, Paul, 1964- Reconstruction to the bloody election of 1920

Weaver, Brian. The citrus industry in the Sunshine State.

Whitney, Eleanor Noss. Priceless Florida: natural ecosystems and native species; illustrated by Eric Jadaszwesky.