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Read MoreAnderson J. Peeler and Florida’s Black Codes
After the surrender of the Confederate armies, Southern leaders aspired to reunion with minimal change from the pre-war status quo. Emancipation could not be ignored, but white Southerners were confident that they could absorb this challenge by legislating the status of the former slaves without federal government interference. When Southern state legislatures convened in the fall and winter of 1865,...
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Read MoreFlorida’s Road to Jim Crow Vote Suppression: Part II – the Poll Tax
In Part I, we discussed the re-registration law that Florida Democrats passed in 1877 immediately after taking full control of the state and the law’s limited success in suppressing black voting in a handful of counties. White conservatives continued to face two significant challenges in their bid for total electoral domination of the state. Although the state’s demographics trended increasingly...
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Read MoreLongstreet’s Last Laugh: Civil War Narratives, Robert E. Lee, and the “blood was up” idiom
[warning: this essay has nothing to do with Florida] “Longstreet used to say that when [Lee’s] blood was up, there wasn’t anything you could do about it. You just had to hope he would calm down.” Shelby Foote, interviewed by John Carr, 1970, in ed. William C. Carter, Conversations with Shelby Foote (1989), p. 42 “[Lee] was confident, excited, the blood was up. He thought the army could do...
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Read MoreWill we mark the Bicentennials of Prospect Bluff? Or the Centennial of the Great Migration?
One Saturday night last October, I took my son and his friend to the FSU-Virginia football game. We cheered with 80,000 other people for the young, overwhelmingly black men that university administrators have decided to call Seminoles as they exchanged intricate, state-sanctioned violence with the young, overwhelmingly black men that administrators at Thomas Jefferson’s university have decided to...
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Read MoreThe Road to Jim Crow Vote Suppression in Florida: Part I
In the 1888 presidential election, about 74% of eligible Florida voters (i.e., men 21 years and older) cast ballots.[1] Just four years later, that percentage plummeted to 33%.[2] How did Florida shrink voter turnout by more than half in four years – and keep it that low, and lower, for decades? Like other Southern states during the late nineteenth century, Florida experimented with legislation until...
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What’s Right and Wrong with this Picture?
Welcome to Blood and Oranges. When Dan Weinfeld and I first started kicking around the idea of an informal, provocative, online journal of Florida history, we went searching for an image that would match our...
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Florida v. Thrasher: Part II – Louis Witkovski and Dark Days in Starke
What do we know about Louis Witkovski? Census records show that he was born in Beyond … Biotin ! viagra effects on women pleased eyelash. Quality a medication? Kay...
Read MoreState of Florida v. B. A. Thrasher: A sensational murder trial from 1891, Part I: Introduction
On Dec. 11, 1889, Louis Witkovski, mayor of Starke, Florida, and sometime...
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Finding Florida? Adam Wasserman did it better than TD Allman
As Dan Weinfeld and I quietly plod along peddling our humble contributions to...
Read MoreSheriff Willis McCall and Sheriff Peter Hagan — Bookends of Custom
Had the mob that formed for the Groveland boys in July 1949 formed instead in...
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B&O Book Club: Devil in the Grove – What about these “Sundown Towns”?
The Blood and Oranges Book Club launches with our reading of Gilbert King’s...
Read More“American Ghost” by Janis Owens – a novel recommended to the B&O audience
Last week, I received a message from goodreads.com announcing the release of a...
Read MoreGilbert King’s “Devil in the Grove”
I’m part-way through this remarkable book that uses the infamous...
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