September 24, 2022 - Florida’s Healing Waters: Gilded Age Mineral Springs, Seaside Resorts, and Health Spas

Rick Kilby, Orlando-based writer, graphic designer and author of Florida’s Healing Waters: Gilded Age Mineral Springs, Seaside Resorts, and Health Spas, will discuss his book, a historical account of a little-known time in our state’s history when tourists poured into the state in search of good health.

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October 29, 2022 - State, Local, and National Campaigns: The Civil Rights Movement in Florida

Michael Butler, Kenan Distinguished Professor of History at Flagler College, will discuss the Civil Rights Movement in Florida The idea that Florida did not experience the tumult of other Deep South states during the Civil Rights Movement is a popular misconception. Florida exceptionalism in relationship to the black freedom struggle is placed in its proper regional and national perspective.

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November 5, 2022 - What Kind of Pie Are We; the Political Hunt for Florida State Symbols

Mark Lane, worked for the The Daytona Beach News-Journal since 1980 as a reporter, copy editor, editorial writer, associate editor, and columnist. He was a full-time metro columnist from 1999 until his retirement in 2022 but still writes a once-a-week column. He will discuss his book on Florida symbols, Roaring Reptiles, Bountiful Citrus, and Neon Pies, which was published in 2019 by University Press of Florida and won the Florida Historical Society’s 2019 Charlton Tebeau Book Award for history writing for a general audience.

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December 3, 2022 - Presidents in Florida

James Clark, Senior Lecturer in the University of Central Florida History Department, has emerged as one of Florida's leading historians, noted for his books and research. Clark will discuss how George Washington had nothing but trouble with Florida, and how Thomas Jefferson tried to steal it. Abraham Lincoln hoped it would win him re-election. Three men came to Florida to fight and ended up in the White House. Franklin Roosevelt was nearly assassinated before he could be inaugurated and quick thinking by a Secret Service agent saved John Kennedy’s life in Florida. Herbert Hoover learned about Al Capone and Warren G. Harding got stuck on a Florida sandbar. Learn about America’s presidents’ strange relationship with our state. This talk is based on the book, Presidents in Florida.

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January 14, 2023 - Pandemics and Protests: America in 1919 and 2020

Martha Bireda, Director of the Blanchard House Museum and frequent public speaker, lecturer, and Living History re-enactor, will discuss the ways in which the social climate of America in 2020 mirrors that of 1919, examining the similarities and differences as well as the factors influencing the social conflicts in each year.

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January 28, 2023 - The French Connection

James “Zach” Zacharias, Senior Curator of Education and Curator of History at Daytona Beach's Museum of Arts and Sciences, will discuss how the French had a long connection to Florida dating back to 1563 with their colony of Fort Caroline. Campbell Town, Napoleon’s nephew, French aid during the American Revolutionary War, pirates, John James Audubon, merci trains and more are discussed in this presentation about the French influence in Florida over the last 500 years.

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February 11, 2023 - Florida and Water: A Historical Perspective

Steven Noll, instructional professor in the history department at the University of Florida, chronicles Florida’s long and difficult relationship with water. Dr. Steven Noll examines attempts to turn water into land and land into water throughout Florida’s history, including contentious water-related issues like the potential restoration of the Everglades, the battle over the Ocklawaha River, the degradation of north Florida’s iconic springs, and more.

 

February 25, 2023 - The Yamasee Indians in Florida, 1663-present

Denise I. Bossy, Associate Professor of History at the University of North Florida, will discuss how the Yamasees were one of the early South’s most powerful nations—colonial or Indigenous. For close to a century, the Yamasees established a series of shifting and interconnected homelands that stretched across much of northern Florida, dominating the region that lay in between Spanish La Florida and British Carolina. The keys to Yamasee power were their expansive networks and their mobility. This talk, by the first scholar to fully reconstruct the history of this powerful nation, reveals how the Yamasees transformed our state’s history.

 

March 11, 2023 - History of Fishing in Ponce Inlet, Florida

Chad MacFie, Manager of the Marine Science Center, will discuss the history of fishing in Ponce Inlet from the Timucuan Indians to the modern day fleet and conservation efforts. He will also share the stories and pictures from the families, fishermen and locals who created the backbone of Ponce Inlet as we know it today.

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March 25, 2023 - James Weldon Johnson Park and Local Black History

Felicia Bevel, Assistant Professor of History at the University of North Florida, will discuss the James Weldon Johnson Park in Jacksonville, Florida as a site of contested memory, specifically of racial violence and Black resistance. It will also discuss this public space as a lens to understand Black history in Florida and important activists such as A. Philip Randolph, Mary McLeod Bethune, Eartha White, and Rodney Hurst.

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April 1, 2023 - OBHS Florida History & Cultural Festival

(10:00 am to 2:00 pm; Folklorist Show is 12 noon to 1:00 pm)

Diane Jacoby, Folklorist, tells the story, while in tantalizing period dress, of the life of the elegant 16th century Spanish noblewoman, Dona Maria de Menendez, illegitimate daughter of Don Pedro Menendez de Aviles, in the tiny colony of Santa Elena as well as the noble life she left behind in Spain. The history & cultural festival will also include several authors, artists, and historical artifact collectors and exhibitors, most offering various items for sale.

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April 8, 2023 - History of Aviation in Florida

Stephen G. Craft, professor and member of the Security Studies and International Affairs department at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University,  will discuss the early development of aviation in Florida especially commercial airlines and military aviation in the first half of the 20th century before transitioning to discuss post-WWII rocket testing that laid a foundation for the space program of the 1950s and 1960s.

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April 22, 2023 - Florida’s Female Pioneers
Peggy Macdonald, alumna of the University of Florida, public historian and adjunct professor at Stetson University and Indian River State College, will examine some of the women who have shaped Florida, including Dr. Esther Hill Hawks, a physician who ran the first racially integrated free school in Florida; Harriet Beecher Stowe, famous for writing Uncle Tom’s Cabin who kick-started Florida’s tourism industry with her 1873 book, Palmetto Leaves; and Betty Mae Tiger Jumper, the first and only female Florida Seminole Tribal Chair and the first elected female tribal chair of any federally recognized American Indian tribe in the nation.

 

May 13, 2023 - U-Boats, Saboteurs, and Orange Groves: Florida in World War II 

Ryan Lowery, owner of Patriot Preservation LLC which specializes in traveling World War II exhibits based on a variety of themes, will discuss Florida's role in World War II which was far more consequential to the safety of the United States than many people realize. Once the war broke out, Germany was probing America's doorstep with submarines and saboteurs. At the time, Florida was the largest state surrounded by water and America increased its defense by creating airbases and naval bases to combat enemy intrusion.

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June 3, 2023 - Florida Food in the Golden Era of Women’s Page Journalism

Kimberly Voss, full professor of journalism at the University of Central Florida, will discuss Florida’s women’s pages – the only place for women in journalism in the 1950s and 1960s – were considered the best in the country. The women in these sections explained Florida food and drink as the state grew. Using backgrounds in home economics, they explained changing tastes in local and national dishes, dessert trends and restaurant reviews.

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June 24, 2023 - Naval Civil War in Florida

Robert Mattson, researcher and portrayer of Union Civil War Navy personnel (officers and enlisted seamen) and member of the USS Pawnee (Marine) Guard, will discuss a broad overview of naval actions in Florida during the American Civil War. For reasons which will be described, this mainly was Union Naval actions, including capture of blockade runners, raids up rivers, salt works raids, and coastal patrol.