Category Florida History
Throwback Tuesday: Authorization of force against Iraq vote in Florida Delegation
The crisis in Syria is certainly different than that of Iraq but for today let’s look back at that authorization vote. Since President Obama violated the War Powers Act in 2011 by sidestepping Congress for a 70-day military exercise against Libya the Iraq vote is the last we have on the authorization of force by […]
Martin Luther King Jr. and St Augustine: Changing Florida
Due to popular demand on this the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington we are re-running a piece we originally published April 4th 2013 to coincide with the 45th anniversary of MLS Jr.’s death. We have added some additional material and context to the original piece. —– Today is the 45th Anniversary of Martin […]
Throwback Tuesday: 1970s Expressway Revolts in Tampa Bay Area and Southeast Florida
In the 1960’s urban planners were preparing for explosive growth in the Tampa Bay area and southeast Florida. Population was exploding in both areas and various proposals for expressways were floated and eventually adopted by regional planning councils. The network of expressways proposed would have displaced existing neighborhoods and would have cost millions in local […]
December 1985: Delta vs Eastern in Florida
While we’ve told the story of Pan Am and National previously on this blog, Florida had two airlines that competed hard and dominated the aviation landscape of the state from the 1950s until the late 1980s. Those two airlines were Delta, based in Atlanta and Eastern which moved its headquarters from New York to Miami […]
Throwback Tuesday: First Siege of Pensacola Failure (1707)
On this day in 1707 the first English/Creek Indian siege of Pensacola was lifted and the Spanish remained in control of West Florida. This was part of the hostilities associated with Queen Anne’s War. We discussed the siege of St Augustine in April when the British came dangerously close to taking East Florida. However the […]
Zest of the Day: Segregation factor in the Florida Democratic gubernatorial primary of 1956
I stumbled upon this comprehensive study of the 1956 Democratic Primary for Governor from the UF Library. This was a primary election where Leroy Collins held off multiple candidates running hard on racial issues. While Collins like almost all Florida Democrats of the 1950s embraced racial segregation his tone was substantially more moderate on the […]
Throwback Tuesday: Governor Burns announces Disney coming to Florida
Full video can be found here on the excellent Florida Memory website.
Politics and the Growth/Fall of Pan American World Airways (Pan Am) in Florida
Today we debut a non-political feature looking at the history of some aspect of Florida’s rich cultural and economic history. Ironically however, this feature has more politics than many of the planned articles do. We start with a favorite subject of mine- aviation, though I will save my preferred history of Eastern Airlines for another […]
Throwback Tuesday: Remembering Air Florida
Air Florida is today remembered for one thing- the tragic Potomac River crash in January 1982 that killed 78 people both on the plane and on the 14th Street Bridge which the aircraft crashed into shortly after taking off from Washington National Airport. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Florida had its own international […]
Florida vs. the rest of the south in Presidential elections
Continuing with recent historical themes on the site, we have decided to rank each former Confederate state in terms of Democratic performance for every Presidential election from 1952 to 2012. Prior to 1952, the GOP had not carried a single southern state since 1928 when Florida was one of three states in the south to […]
