Making of America

Recognized for its poise and fashion, Miami Beach embodies the best elements of the new American city: cultural diversity, imaginative architecture, and dazzling scenery. In many aspects, Miami Beach is a metropolitan masterpiece, sculpted by the careful hands of visionary entrepreneurs against a magnificent coastal backdrop. The evolution of Miami Beach from a small, uninhabited strip of palmetto scrub and swamp into an internationally-renowned resort is a fascinating tale of human ingenuity, endurance, and foresight. A milestone in the city's development, the year 1920 marked many significant improvement, such as the new County Causeway bridge, and many "firsts" for the expanding hamlet, including the first electric trolley, the first automated telephone system, and its first post office building. Readers of all ages will be thoroughly entertained as they explore their Miami Beach of yesteryear: a time of Prohibition and bootlegging, grand hotels and lavish casinos, budding polo fields and golf courses, and the many distinct personalities that added color and life to this burgeoning town.

Taking its name from a fortification established more than 160 years ago during the Second Seminole War, Fort Lauderdale boasts a history stretching back 5,000 years before the first white settlers arrived in the eighteenth century. From beautiful tales of the "mysterious" New River that helped launch the community to more recent stories of rum running and gambling, segregation and integration, and boom and bust, the history of this Florida city is told here through the everyday lives of those who lived it.

Since its exploration in the early sixteenth century, the geography of today's Sunshine State has been hotly contested, both through diplomacy and violence, by various forces of Spanish, French, British, and Native American influence. As late as the nineteenth century, Florida's people and soil remained controversial-its land emerging as vital, accessible territory for expansion for the nascent American population. Through a combination of political maneuvering and coercive action, the American government secured much of Florida and soon established the new town of Tallahassee as the capital seat, situated in the Red Hills region between the two most populous settlements: St. Augustine and Pensacola.

Tallahassee: A Capital City History chronicles the story of the city's growth from a frontier community into a modern Southern metropolis, renowned for its beauty, football, and political dramas. First, readers will journey with Panfilo de Narvaez, Hernando de Soto, and other waves of Spanish adventurers searching for the promise of gold and silver as they explored the lush wilderness that was Tallahassee. From there, readers discover a landscape ever changing as the centuries brought new settlers with pioneer visions of growth and wealth. Touching upon the major eras of this city's history, antebellum, Civil War, Reconstruction, the Depression, and Civil Rights, this comprehensive volume details the full identity of Tallahassee, celebrating its major figures and remembering the contributions of many of its everyday people, who truly shaped the course of Tallahassee's evolution.

Florida's railroad heritage began in the 1830s amidst Native American upheaval and territorial colonization. Surpassing waterways as the primary mode of transport, the "Iron Horse" linked practically every town and city, carried tourists and locals, and ably conveyed the wealth of Florida's mines, factories, forests, groves, and farms. Nearly 175 years later, railroads still remain a dependable source of transport within the Sunshine State.

Kissimmee, Florida traces its name to the Jororo tribe, among the first to settle along the river valley. Riverboat captains, entrepreneurs, and speculators found Kissimmee and nearby Lake Tohopekaliga irresistible, and soon settlers followed. The 1880s marked this city's first brush with tourism, as the Tropical Hotel became the largest resort hotel south of Jacksonville. As the cattle town struggled to survive floods, the Depression, and downtown neglect in favor of spillover Walt Disney World business, committed citizens fought back and spiritedly rekindled the town into a favored tourist spot.

Years before the first shots of the Civil War were fired, Florida witnessed a clash of wills and ways that prompted three wars unlike any others in America's history.

Among the most well-known of Florida's native peoples, the Seminole Indians frustrated troops of militia and volunteer soldiers for decades during the first half of the nineteenth century in the ongoing struggle to keep hold of their ancestral lands. While careers and reputations of American military and political leaders were made and destroyed in the mosquito-infested swamps of Florida's interior, the Seminoles and their allies, including the Miccosukee tribe and many escaped slaves, managed to wage war on their own terms. The study of guerrilla warfare tactics employed by the Seminoles may have aided modern American forces fighting in Viet Nam, Cambodia, and other regions.

Emerging as Florida's largest inland city, Orlando in its infancy more resembled the Old West than the Old South-a frontier town born in the days of the Seminole Wars. The free-spirited early years of cattle ranching and cowboys on the palmetto prairie gave way to a series of booms throughout the city's history. Whether it was railroads, real estate, citrus, or tourism, Orlando has been a community able to cultivate growth through big dreams and an ambitious attitude.