Florida Histories

Doris Weatherford is the author of A History of the American Suffragist Movement and other reference guides on American women’s history. Her latest book is They Dared to Dream: Florida Women Who Shaped History (University Press of Florida) which reveals the lifestyles and achievements of women throughout landmark moments in history, including Native civilizations before the arrival of European colonists; early Spanish, British, and French exploration, the Civil War era, Reconstruction, the early twentieth century, and the population explosions post–World War II. Featuring often-celebrated personalities—including Mary Martha Reid, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton—alongside the lesser-known lives of Princess Murat, lighthouse keeper Barbara Mabrity, Florida Memorial College founder Sarah Ann Blocker, and others—this pivotal examination of Florida’s female agents of change draws attention to women’s instrumental roles in the historical events that defined the Sunshine State.

Leslie Kemp Poole is adjunct professor in the Environmental Studies and History departments at Rollins College. She is the author of Maitland. Her latest book is Saving Florida: Women's Fight for the Environment in the Twentieth Century (University Press of Florida). Florida is renowned for its beautiful beaches, natural springs, and subtropical wilderness, but it is widely joked that the official bird should be the construction crane. Saving Florida reveals how women’s clubs prompted legislation to establish Florida’s first state park, which became the core of Everglades National Park, in 1916—before women even had the right to vote. Many women led the fight for unprecedented changes in how the Sunshine State reveres its unique natural resources. They set the foundation for this century’s environmental agenda, which came to include the idea of sustainable development. As a collective force, they forever altered how others saw women’s roles in society. Saving Florida looks not only at this collective endeavor, but at the individual women who worked to protect Florida’s natural resources, despite limitations of gender.

Lyn Millner is associate professor of journalism at Florida Gulf Coast University. She has written and produced stories for NPR's Morning Edition, the New York Times, USA Today, the Miami Herald, Oxford American, and others. The Allure of Immortality: An American Cult, a Florida Swamp, and a Renegade Prophet (University Press of Florida) tells the story of Cyrus Teed, a charismatic and controversial guru who at the age of 30 had been “illuminated” by an angel in his electro-alchemical laboratory. At the turn of the twentieth century, surrounded by the marvels of the Second Industrial Revolution, he proclaimed himself a prophet and led 200 people out of Chicago and into a new age. Or so he promised. His followers, the Koreshans settled in a mosquito-infested scrubland just south of Fort Myers, Florida, and set to building a communal utopia inside what they believed was a hollow earth.  In The Allure of Immortality, Lyn Millner weaves the many bizarre strands of Teed’s life and those of his followers into a riveting story of angels, conmen, angry husbands, yellow journalism, and ultimately, hope.