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This book synthesizes the landscape histories of Native Americans in southeastern North America from the arrival of the Spaniards in the sixteenth century to the first decades of the American Republic. Relying on archaeological data and historical sources, the work outlines the ways in which Native populations accommodated and contested the growing encroachments of colonialism and colonial powers. Traditional landscape practices were greatly transformed by epidemic diseases, chronic warfare, and a widespread slave trade in Indian populations. Research demonstrates that populations adapted to these challenges in two major ways. First, they built on traditional histories of mobility to develop new modes of migration and travel to escape regions of conflict and to gain access to important colonial towns and resources. Second, seeking safety in numbers, Native Americans increasingly formed coalescent communities composed of two or more cultural groups. These coalescent communities evolved into the groups known today as Cherokees, Choctaws, Creeks, Chickasaws, Catawbas, and Seminoles. The study further explores how the evolution of these groups was connected to events and processes of the broader political economy in the Atlantic World, including the rise of plantation slavery, the growth of the deerskin trade, the birth of the consumer revolution, and the emergence of capitalism.

How we determine what is nature, what is wild, or even what in nature is worth protecting occurs through our human perspective. Whether it is a charismatic manatee or a majestic redwood, we care about and protect the things we love because they offer us something we value. To make this value relevant in the economic marketplace of competing choices, Wild Capital: Nature’s Economic and Ecological Wealth relies on the ecosystem services model, where nature’s value is determined through the services intact ecosystems provide to our well-being. As one of the recreation components of this model, this book uses ecotourism and the changing tourist dynamic, as well as our evolving relationship with nature, to demonstrate how we can assign a measurable worth to natural resources. If a developer or a policy maker can more equitably compare the capital asset value of development with that of wild nature, better decisions regarding economic and ecological trade-offs can be made. Wild Capital then incorporates the cultural bias we have for charismatic megafauna to link policy decisions regarding biodiversity and habitat conservation to those charismatic animals we care about so intensely. The five megafauna case studies provide solid evidence of the role charismatic species can play in protecting our planet’s biodiversity and ensuring our well-being long into the future.

Using archaeology as a tool for understanding long-term ecological and climatic change, this volume synthesizes current knowledge about the ways Native Americans interacted with their environments along the Atlantic coast over the past 10,000 years. Leading scholars discuss how the region’s indigenous peoples grappled with significant changes to shorelines and estuaries, from sea level rise to shifting plant and animal distributions to European settlement and urbanization. Together, they provide a valuable perspective spanning millennia on the diverse marine and nearshore ecosystems of the entire eastern seaboard—the icy waters of Newfoundland and the Gulf of Maine, the Middle Atlantic regions of the New York Bight and the Chesapeake Bay, and the warm shallows of the St. Johns River and the Florida Keys. This broad comparative outlook brings together populations and areas previously studied in isolation. Today, the Atlantic coast is home to tens of millions of people who inhabit ecosystems that are in dramatic decline. The research in this volume not only illuminates the past but also provides important tools for managing coastal environments into an uncertain future.

Deadly Virtue argues that the history of the French Calvinist attempt to colonize Florida in the 1560s is key to understanding the roots of American whiteness in sixteenth-century colonialism, science, and Protestantism. The book places the history of Fort Caroline, Florida, into the context of Protestant colonialism and understandings of the body, emotion, and identity held in common by travelers throughout the early Atlantic world. Protestants envisioned finding a rich and powerful Indigenous king, converting him to Christianity, and then establishing a Protestant-Indigenous alliance to build an empire under Indigenous leadership that would compete with European monarchies. However, when the colony was wiped out by the Spanish, these Protestants took this as a condemnation from their god for this plan of collaborating with Indigenous people and developed separatist strategies for future Protestant colonial projects. By introducing the reader to the humoral model of the body, this book shows how race, gender, sexuality, and Christian morality came to intersect in modern understandings of whiteness.

NASA and the Long Civil Rights Movement addresses the role/relationship of NASA and the Apollo program to the “long” civil rights movement in, particularly but not limited to, the Deep South (Huntsville, Florida, Houston, Mississippi, and New Orleans) and identifies the impact of NASA on the movement and the experiences of those who were directly affected by the space program and the impact of the movement on NASA’s development during the Cold War.

During the Jim Crow era, Florida’s public health nurses, mostly white and a few black women, tackled the state’s public health issues born of race, climate, geography, and poverty. These pioneering professional women were often the only ones available to deliver current health improvement information into the homes of people who were out of the reach of modern medical care. From Florida’s Panhandle to the Everglades and on to the Keys, they faced a number of challenges to reach both white and African American people in rural communities. Like the nurses in other states of the South and the North, they drew strength from their professional identity, but in confronting Florida’s unique challenges, their determination to save lives set them apart as they battled the state’s daunting environmental and cultural obstacles. They found innovative ways to build a bridge between the communities they served and public health policies, both state and federal, that addressed the threats of infection and the high infant and maternal mortality levels. Competing cultural constructions of health shaped their groundbreaking efforts to reach and serve underprivileged members of each race, whether to prevent illness and disease or to improve childbirth and general wellbeing.

Migrations in Late Mesoamerica gathers scholars from different disciplines to address the role of migration during the most tumultuous centuries of Mesoamerican prehistory (A.D. 500–1500). Ethnohistoric, linguistic, biological, and archaeological data coupled with visual imagery and hieroglyphic texts associate the final millennium of Mesoamerican prehistory with the political, economic, and social changes that often unmoored populations from ancestral lands. Independent investigations into these topics have repeatedly discerned the movement of social groups at their core, but migration itself has rarely been the central focus of theoretical analysis. The ongoing rehabilitation of migration as a subject for study now allows prehistorians to re-examine its relationship to other areas of social life. An introductory chapter isolates characteristics of migration that distinguish it from other forms of human mobility, and it argues that migration must be analyzed in conjunction with the other social processes in which it is embedded. Select representatives from archaeology, biological anthropology, linguistics, ethnohistory, epigraphy, and art history present contributions on migration dynamics, causes and impacts, indigenous perceptions of migration, and the methods and assumptions we use when identifying or analyzing our specific cases.

Archaeology of Domestic Landscapes of the Enslaved in the Caribbean examines the diversity of living environments that the enslaved inhabitants of the colonial Caribbean by analyzing archaeological evidence collected from a wide variety of sites across the region. Archaeological investigations of domestic architecture and artifacts illuminate the nature of household organization; fundamental changes in settlement patterns; and the manner in which power was invariably linked with the material arrangements of space among the enslaved living and working in a variety of contexts throughout the region, including plantations, fortifications, and urban centers. While research in the region has provided a considerable amount of data at the household-level, much of this work is biased towards artifact analysis, resulting in unfamiliarity with the considerations that went into constructing and inhabiting households. The chapters in this book provide detailed reconstructions of the built environments associated with slavery and account for the cultural behaviors and social arrangements that shaped these spaces. It brings together case studies of Caribbean slave settlements through historical archaeology as a means of exposing the diversity of people and practices in these various landscapes, across the British, French, Dutch, and Danish colonies in both the Greater and Lesser Antilles as well as the Bahamian archipelago.

The Modern Republican Party in Florida chronicles the emergence of the modern Republican Party in Florida. It provides the historic political foundation for the modern political era in Florida; it identifies the key elements of Republican Party organizations and structures that became the foundation for the current Republican network; and it contrasts the current political environment to the one-party era of the Democratic Pork Chop Gang. The narrative of the book describes the successes in the state-wide campaigns for governor and for positions on the Florida Cabinet. It provides an overview of the role of both Florida Republicans in national, presidential politics and Floridians serving in the United States House and Senate. It describes the decennial redistricting struggles and other obstacles that Republicans overcame as they became the majority in both Houses of the state Legislature, and it discusses the opportunities for women and minorities that accompanied this Republican emergence. Within the narrative are descriptions of the changes in state government made by Republicans or with their bipartisan cooperation. The book also provides an overview of the Republican influence on the state policies for public education and school choice; criminal justice and prison reform; taxation and business incentives; and consumer protection and environment preservation, including the protection of the Florida Everglades. The book identifies the officeholders, volunteers, and party officials who contributed to, and became part of, the Republican network. It also discusses the ever-changing elements of the Florida political arena, which includes voters with no party affiliation, soft money committees, and independent campaign consultants.

La Meri (Russell Meriwether Hughes, 1899–1988) was a performing artist, choreographer, teacher, and writer who built her career on ethnologic dance from many parts of the world. In the 1920s and 1930s, under the management of her agent-husband Guido Carreras, she toured in Latin America, Europe, Asia, the Pacific, and the United States. Despite the heavy schedule of travel and performances, she was able to obtain instruction in local dance genres, purchase costumes, and obtain recordings of the music in many of the countries. The new material would then be added to her concert programs. In late 1939, touring was no longer possible because of World War II, so La Meri and Carreras settled in New York City. There, she established a school, the Ethnologic Dance Center, and dance companies. She continued performing in New York and on tour in the United States, and, in addition to teaching and concert work, created original choreographies using techniques such as those of India and Spain. In 1960, she moved to Cape Cod, Massachusetts, where she continued her work until 1984, when she returned to San Antonio. In addition to her practical work in dance, La Meri also published writings that set forth her conceptions, understandings, goals and methodologies. This book is both a biography of La Meri and an analysis of the significance of her theory and practice, with attention to her own performance, choreography, writings, and teaching.