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The growth and development of Sarasota's North Tamiami Trail is chronicled by renowned local writer and historian Jeff
LaHurd in this colorful pictorial guide to the gateway to Sarasota during the 20th Century. The North Tamiami Trail: A Drive Through Sarasota History was commissioned by the Sarasota Alliance for Historic Preservation to highlight the rich history of this stretch of the Tamiami Trail and help familiarize readers with the historic structures that still exist, and memorialize many of those that have been lost to development.
Supplementing Jeff's work on the physical aspects of the Trail's history, the Sarasota Alliance for Historic Preservation has provided an introduction that puts the Trail's history in a social context. We provide a broad overview of the history of Overtown, the Sarasota's first African American community. Located adjacent to North Trail, its residents helped build its history, but were not able to enjoy its benefits until later in the 20th Century.
Finally, the book provides the reader with a detailed map to facilitate self-exploration of the North Trail, its surviving businesses and its history.
This guide includes 36 species of palm trees, both common and exotic, found throughout the Southeast U.S.. Includes both solitary and clustering species, both cultivated and species found in the wild. Species list by Alan Meerow, palm expert and author of the authoritative Betrock's Landscape Plants. lllustrations by Robert O'Brien, well-known artist and naturalist based in Austin, Texas and Clearwater, Florida.
The palmetto, also known as the cabbage palm or Sabal palmetto, is an iconic part of the southeastern American landscape and the state tree of Florida and South Carolina. In The Palmetto Book, Jono Miller offers surprising facts and dispels common myths about an important native plant that remains largely misunderstood.
Miller answers basic questions such as: Are palms trees? Where did they grow historically? When should palmettos be pruned? What is swamp cabbage and how do you prepare it? Did Winslow Homer's watercolors of palmettos inadvertently document rising sea level? How can these plants be both flammable and fireproof? Based on historical research, Miller argues that cabbage palms can live for more than two centuries. The palmettos that were used to build Fort Moultrie at the start of the Revolutionary War thwarted a British attack on Charleston--and ended up on South Carolina's flag.
Delving into biology, Miller describes the anatomy of palm fronds and their crisscrossed leaf bases, called bootjacks. He traces the underground "saxophone" structure of the young plant's root system. He explores the importance of palmettos for many wildlife species, including Florida Scrub-Jays and honey bees. Miller also documents how palmettos can pose problems for native habitats, citrus groves, and home landscapes.
From Low Country sweetgrass baskets to Seminole chickees and an Elvis Presley movie set, the story of the cabbage palm touches on numerous dimensions of the natural and cultural history of the Southeast. Exploring both the past and present of this distinctive species, The Palmetto Book is a fascinating and enlightening journey.
"For the first time, the real story behind the Highwaymen has emerged . . . a well-researched, lively, and comprehensive overview of the development and contribution of these African-American artists and their place in the history of Florida's popular culture."--Mallory McCane O'Connor, author of Lost Cities of the Ancient Southeast
The Highwaymen introduces a group of young black artists who painted their way out of the despair awaiting them in citrus groves and packing houses of 1950s Florida. As their story recaptures the imagination of Floridians and their paintings fetch ever-escalating prices, the legacy of their freshly conceived landscapes exerts a new and powerful influence on the popular conception of the Sunshine State.
While the value of Highwaymen paintings has soared in recent years, until now no authoritative account of the lives and work of these black Florida artists has existed. Emerging in the late 1950s, the Highwaymen created idyllic, quickly realized images of the Florida dream and peddled, by some estimates, 200,000 of them from the trunks of their cars.
Working with inexpensive materials, the Highwaymen produced an astonishing number of landscapes that depict a romanticized Florida--a faraway place of wind-swept palm trees, billowing cumulus clouds, wetlands, lakes, rivers, ocean, and setting sun. With paintings still wet, they loaded their cars and traveled the state's east coast, selling the images door-to-door and store-to-store, in restaurants, offices, courthouses, and bank lobbies. Sometimes characterized as motel art, the work is a hybrid form of landscape painting, corrupting the classically influenced ideals of the Highwaymen's white mentor, A. E. "Bean" Backus. At first, the paintings sold like boom-time real estate. In succeeding decades, however, they were consigned to attics and garage sales. Rediscovered in the mid-1990s, today they are recognized as the work of American folk artists. Gary Monroe tells the story behind the Highwaymen, a loose association of 25 men and 1 woman from the Ft. Pierce area--a fascinating mixture of individual talent, collective enterprise, and cultural heritage. He also offers a critical look at the paintings and the movement's development. Added to this are personal reminiscences by some of the artists, along with a gallery of 63 full-color reproductions of their paintings.
James says: A fun read that tracks the people and history behind saving this mysterious feline from extinction.
The quiet manatee has long been a flash point of frequent environmental debates. It is Florida's most famous endangered species, as well as its most controversial. Manatees appear on hundreds of license plates, attract hordes of tourists, and expose the uneasy relationships between science and the law and between freedom and responsibility like no other animal.
As passions have flared and resentments have grown, the battle over manatee protection has evolved into a war, and no reporter has followed the story more closely than Craig Pittman, the first environmental writer to explore the complex history, culture, and science of the controversies and concerns surrounding this remarkable creature.
With an abiding interest in the uncertain fate of this unique species, Manatee Insanity provides the first in-depth history of the attempts to provide legal protection for the manatee. Pittman follows Florida's gentle giants through time and space, detailing interactions with a variety of human actors, from Jacques-Yves Cousteau to Jeb Bush to Jimmy Buffett, from a popular children's book author to a federal lawman who dressed in a gorilla suit for the ultimate undercover assignment.
A New York Times Bestseller
To some people, Florida is a paradise; to others, a punch line. As Oh, Florida! shows, it's both of these and, more important, it's a Petri dish, producing trends that end up influencing the rest of the country. Without Florida there would be no NASCAR, no Bettie Page pinups, no Glenn Beck radio rants, no USA Today, no "Stand Your Ground," ...You get the idea. To outsiders, Florida seems baffling. It's a state where the voters went for Barack Obama twice, yet elected a Tea Party candidate as governor. Florida is touted as a carefree paradise, yet it's also known for its perils--alligators, sinkholes, pythons, hurricanes, and sharks, to name a few. It attracts 90 million visitors a year, some drawn by its impressive natural beauty, others bewitched by its manmade fantasies. Oh, Florida! explores those contradictions and shows how they fit together to make this the most interesting state. It is the first book to explore the reasons why Florida is so wild and weird--and why that's okay. But there is far more to Florida than its sideshow freakiness. Oh, Florida! explains how Florida secretly, subtly influences all the other states in the Union, both for good and for ill.