One of the main water resources for Florida, Alabama, and Georgia, the Apalachicola River begins where the Chattahoochee and Flint rivers meet at Lake Seminole and flow unimpedted for 106 miles, through the red hills and floodplains of the Florida panhandle into the Gulf of Mexico. Voices of the Apalachicola is a collection of oral histories from more than thirty individuals who have lived out their entire lives in this region, including the last steamboat pilot on the river system, sharecroppers who escaped servitude, turpentine workers in Tate's Hell, sawyers of "old-as-Christ" cypress, beekeepers working the last large tupelo stand, and a Creek chief descended from a 200-year unbroken line of chiefs.

An illustrated history of the bay's sites and communities.

In the Apalachicola River Valley, outdoor adventure is a way of life. It's a culture of fishing, hunting and everything in between, but this culture is fading as overdevelopment upstream dries up the region's natural resources. These narratives are part of an effort to capture the memories and keep those traditions alive. The quirky stories include calling a gator to a creek bank, exploring the origin of "Polehenge" and understanding just what makes Catawba worms so special. Learn the basics of frog gigging and ponder how many fish make a "mess." Author and Florida native Jim McClellan revives local stories from the banks of the Big River and preserves the allure of this fading swamp paradise.

"This work is a collection of works by Southern naval participants. The narratives traverse the field from the fond and not-so-fond memories to the carefully worded reports of an officer claiming a victory or the loss of a ship. The writings lend information as one tries to understand what personnel faced during this time in history"--Provided by publisher.

“He’s a gambler at best. A con artist at worst,” her aunt had said of the handlebar-mustached man who snatched Ella Wallace away from her dreams of studying art in France. Eighteen years later, that man has disappeared, leaving Ella alone and struggling to support her three sons. While the world is embroiled in World War I, Ella fights her own personal battle to keep the mystical Florida land that has been in her family for generations from the hands of an unscrupulous banker. When a mysterious man arrives at Ella’s door in an unconventional way, he convinces her he can help her avoid foreclosure, and a tenuous trust begins. But as the fight for Ella’s land intensifies, it becomes evident that things are not as they appear. Hypocrisy and murder soon shake the coastal town of Apalachicola and jeopardize Ella’s family.

This engaging introduction to Florida's Emerald Coast guides readers through a fascinating history that includes ancient tribes, Scottish pioneers, a Civil War camp, and a pirate's playground. Original.

"Ten years ago, Sue Cerulean realized the coastlines of her childhood along the New Jersey shore and of her adult years (a little-developed necklace of Gulf islands in Florida) were beginning to shift into the sea. She began to chronicle the story of "her" coastal areas as they are now, as they once were, and how they might be as Earth's oceans rise. Cerulean and her husband, oceanographer Jeff Chanton, have taken many field trips in various parts of these coastal areas"--

The Land Speaks explores the intersection of two vibrant fields, oral history and environmental studies. Ranging across farm and forest, city and wilderness, river and desert, this collection of fourteen oral histories gives voice to nature and the stories it has to tell. These essays consider topics as diverse as environmental activism, wilderness management, public health, urban exploring, and smoke jumping. They raise questions about the roles of water, neglected urban spaces, land ownership concepts, protectionist activism, and climate change. Covering almost every region of the United States and part of the Caribbean, Lee and Newfont and their diverse collection of contributors address the particular contributions oral history can make toward understanding issues of public land and the environment. In the face of global warming and events like the Flint water crisis, environmental challenges are undoubtedly among the most pressing issues of our time. These essays suggest that oral history can serve both documentary and problem-solving functions as we grapple with these challenges.

Florida is a story of astonishing growth, a state swelling from 500,000 residents at the outset of the 20th century to some 16 million at the end. As recently as mid-century, on the eve of Pearl Harbor, Florida was the smallest state in the South. At the dawn of the millennium, it is the fourth largest in the country, a megastate that was among those introducing new words into the American vernacular: space coast, climate control, growth management, retirement community, theme park, edge cities, shopping mall, boomburbs, beach renourishment, Interstate, and Internet. Land of Sunshine, State of Dreams attempts to understand the firestorm of change that erupted into modern Florida by examining the great social, cultural, and economic forces driving its transformation. Gary Mormino ranges far and wide across the landscape and boundaries of a place that is at once America's southernmost state and the northernmost outpost of the Caribbean. From the capital, Tallahassee--a day's walk from the Georgia border--to Miami--a city distant but tantalizingly close to Cuba and Haiti--Mormino traces the themes of Florida's transformation: the echoes of old Dixie and a vanishing Florida; land booms and tourist empires; revolutions in agriculture, technology, and demographics; the seductions of the beach and the dynamics of a graying population; and the enduring but changing meanings of a dreamstate. Beneath the iconography of popular culture is revealed a complex and complicated social framework that reflects a dizzying passage from New Spain to Old South, New South to Sunbelt.

In the 1970s, justices on the Florida Supreme Court were popularly elected. But a number of scandals threatened to topple the court until public outrage led to profound reforms and fundamental changes in the way justices were seated. One justice abruptly retired after being filmed on a high-roller junket to Las Vegas. Two others tried to fix cases in lower courts on behalf of campaign supporters. A fourth destroyed evidence by shredding his copy of a document into "seventeen equal" strips of paper that he then flushed down a toilet. As the journalist who wrote most of the stories that exposed these events, Martin Dyckman played a key role in revealing the corruption, favoritism, and cronyism then rampant in the court. A Most Disorderly Court recounts this dark period in Florida politics, when stunning revelations regularly came to light. He also traces the reform efforts that ultimately led to a constitutional amendment providing for the appointment of all Florida's appellate judges, and emphasizes the absolute importance of confidential sources for journalists.