In the 1700s, as Florida’s Indigenous tribes were displaced, the forebears of the Miccosukee and Seminole descended along the southwestern Gulf Coast. They soon began working with Hispanic and Indigenous fishermen from various Spanish colonies, who had seasonal operations along the barrier islands.

2023  Harry T. and Harriette V. Moore Award Winner

Growing up, Alonzo Felder heard just a few stories about his great-grandfather A.S.J. Allen. In this book the author shares his process, providing guidance to others seeking to discover the stories of their ancestors. The Rev. A.S.J. Allen was a respected African American community leader in Alachua County, Florida. In 1904, he was killed by a white neighbor over a property border dispute. In the Jim Crow era, the white neighbor faced no consequences for his actions.

2022 Samuel Proctor Award Winner

John Wayne Mixson served as a Florida state representative, Florida lieutenant governor, and briefly as the 39th governor of Florida. The results of his work while filling these roles continue to positively impact the state of Florida and its citizens.

Author Sid Riley was a political columnist, managing editor, and part owner of The Jackson County Times newspaper. For this book, Riley conducted extensive oral history interviews with John Wayne Mixson, and his wife Margie Mixson.

This book is easy and interesting reading. It presents the life and legacy of the late Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune holistically and concludes with testimonies from living witnesses. The author narrates Dr. Bethune's early years and documents how developments in those years influenced her later accomplishments. Permeating Dr. Bethune's spectacular career is a philosophy based on deep religious convictions and held that work was honorable, no matter how menial the task. - Dr. Oswald P. Bronson President of Bethune-Cookman College, July 19, 2004

2011 Patrick D. Smith Award

“The trouble with panthers is they can’t change. With the whole world changin round it, old panther got no choice but to go on bein a panther. It can’t reason like you and me -- can’t decide to earn its livin a little differently.”

Central Florida, November 2004. Upon hearing this admonition from his dying grandfather, young cowman, Bodie Rawlerson, doesn’t hesitate to promise the old man that he won’t be like the panther. Though he hates change, fears it more than anything else, he vows to do whatever necessary to carry on the family legacy of raising cattle on the land he so dearly loves. But unbeknownst to Bodie, forces are already in motion to render his promise impossible to keep. Within days of his grandfather’s passing, these forces of human (and inhuman) nature will convince him that nothing lasts forever, that change is life’s only certainty -- that time and chance do indeed rule us all.

Saving Home is an historical novel set during the English siege of St. Augustine in 1702. The story is told through the eyes of nine-year-old Luissa de Cueva and her friends, ten-year-old Diego de las Alas, and a Timucuan Indian girl named Junco. Based on meticulous research, Saving Home engages readers of all ages with descriptions of Spanish and Native American families seeking refuge for more than six weeks within the walls of the Castillo de San Marcos as St. Augustine goes up in flames and a battle rages around them. This exciting historical novel has messages about life, family, and what is important that will resonate with both the young and the young at heart.

Stetson Kennedy collected folklore and oral histories throughout Florida for the WPA between 1937 and 1942. The result was this classic Florida book, back in print for the first time in more than twenty years with an Afterword update and dozens of historic photographs never before published with this work. Alan Lomax said, "I doubt very much that a better book about Florida folklife will ever be written."

“I don't know of any book on my whole shelf that hits me any harder than Palmetto Country. It gives me a better trip and taste and look and feel for Florida than I got in the forty-seven states I've actually been in body and tramped in boot. If only, and if only, all our library books could say what [Kennedy does]—the jokes and songs and old ballads about voodoo and the hoodoo and the bigly winds down in your neck of the woodvine.”  --Woody Guthrie Folk Musician and singer-songwriter, This Land is Your Land

2016 Stetson Kennedy Award Winner

Abel Bartley's new book In No Ways Tired is both the unique story of a particular Florida community's struggle with the integration of public schools, and a reflection of similar experiences throughout the South there desegregation "with all deliberate speed" took decades to achieve.

How did Florida, one of the country’s four smallest and least developed states in 1880, become within fifty years not only a tourist mecca but also a hub for technological innovation?

To explore this remarkable Golden Age, Rollins College brought together a wide variety of scholars and artists – historians and poets, biologists and environmental scientists, philosophers and literary critics – to help shine light on a period that, despite its challenges and failures, transformed the Sunshine State.  This volume brings together their insights as we all continue reflecting on our post, our present, and our future.

2008 Rembert Patrick Award Winner

This book is the story of people of vision and courage, of a small group of prominent Saint Augustine investors who conceived of the Florida waterway and began the first dredging work; of an obscure group of New England capitalists who provided significant financing and obtained a million acres of undeveloped Florida public land in pursuing what was, at best, a speculative enterprise; of innumerable citizen groups like the Florida east coast chamber associations and the larger Atlantic Deeper Waterways Association that demanded at the turn of the last century what they believed was the peoples right-a public waterway, free of the burden of tolls; and finally, of the U>S> Army Corps of Engineers, who conducted all of the Florida waterway's early surveys and assumed the project's control in 1929 to convert what was once a private toll way into Florida's modern-day, toll-free Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway.

2008 James J. Horgan Award Winner

Historical adventures for young Floridians. The short stories of Carolyn Teicher Potts.

For more than ten thousand years before Christopher Columbus "discovered" the Americas and Juan Ponce de León gave La Florida its name, there were thriving, complex societies of indigenous people living here. The land that would become the state of Florida was home to powerful, innovative tribes including the Timucua, the Apalachee, the Tocobaga, the Calusa, the Ais, and later the Seminole. The fascinating Taíno people populated the Caribbean.

Theodore Morris is known as the preeminent painter of Florida's indigenous people, and he now adds Caribbean culture to his repertoire. His artwork graces the covers of academic books and fills the walls of historical museums and art galleries throughout the state. In this book, Florida & Caribbean Native People: Paintings by Theodore Morris, the artist's own commentary on his work is augmented by the insights of some of Florida's leading archaeologists including Steven H. Koski, Keith Ashley, Bonnie G. McEwan, Brent R. Weisman, Ryan J. Wheeler, Robert S. Carr, Ann S. Cordell, and James P. Pepe.