Senator Bob Graham and attorney Chris Hand, co-authors of the book “America, The Owner’s Manual: You Can Fight City Hall and Win,” participated in a panel discussion recently at the Zora Neale Hurston Festival of the Arts and Humanities in Eatonville.

The topic was “Citizen Activism Works.” The panelists talked about effective ways that anyone with passion for a particular issue can make the government work for them.

Senator Bob Graham is one of Florida’s most respected and popular politicians. He served four years in the Florida legislature before becoming governor in 1978. He left office with an 83% approval rating, and beginning in 1986, served three consecutive terms in the United States Senate. He created the Bob Graham Center for Public Service at the University of Florida.

“Voting may be the single most important thing you do, because that selects the people who will use their constitutional responsibilities to advance the interests of the nation, but it’s not the end of your citizenship responsibilities,” says Graham. “We all have the ability to shape our community and our state and our nation by our own action.”

Attorney Chris Hand has served as speech writer and press secretary for Senator Graham, and was Chief of Staff for the City of Jacksonville under Alvin Brown, that city’s first African American mayor.

The advice that Senator Graham and Chris Hand provide in their book is non-partisan. They offer step-by step instructions for engaging with the government effectively.

“For those who are pleased with the election results, the question has been ‘what do we do now to hold elected officials accountable to the change they’ve promised to bring?’” says Hand. “For those who were disappointed by the election results its ‘did I do enough? Are there other ways that I can get involved?’ This book is hopefully one of the answers to that question.”

In their book, Graham and Hand present the stories of 35 people and groups who have challenged the government successfully on a variety of issues. Several of their examples are from Florida.

“It wasn’t that long ago that there was a strong proposal to demolish what is now South Beach,” says Graham. “The economic and political leaders of the city felt that Disney had built a wall across Florida, and that tourists wouldn’t come south to their traditional places such as Miami Beach, unless they had similar tourist attractions to Disney. The idea was to take down much of the old Art Deco architecture and build a theme park.”

Barbara Capitman led an effort to save and restore the iconic Art Deco buildings of South Beach.

“Her persistence and her skill in manipulating a very complex bureaucratic process to get South Beach designated as a National Historic District were the keys to saving South Beach and really saving Miami Beach as an international destination,” says Graham.

Another example of effective, active citizenship discussed by Graham and Hand involves people from the Florida Keys fighting a dramatic increase in insurance rates.

The series of hurricanes in 2004 and 2005 had a significant impact on much of the state, but not the Florida Keys. Residents were shocked when they saw a dramatic rise in their property insurance rates, even though they had not been affected by the storms.

“So they used one of the most important skills of effective citizenship,” says Hand. “They did their homework. They consulted with experts, they did research, and they learned that these rate increases really weren’t based on anything justifiable. Having done this excellent homework and turned themselves into credible citizen advocates, they took their case to Tallahassee and were successful in having these insurance increases rolled back.”

Graham and Hand say that if you know your facts and become a credible citizen advocate, you have a much greater chance of success in making the government respond to your concerns.

Besides having passion for an issue, and preparation of a credible argument, the authors say that persistence is the key to effective citizenship.

“Citizenship isn’t intuitive,” says Graham. “You’re not born with an automatic awareness of what it takes to be an effective citizen. It’s a skill like playing a sport or a musical instrument.”

The 29^th annual Zora Neale Hurston Festival of the Arts and Humanities is underway and continues through January 28.

The event is presented by the Association to Preserve the Eatonville Community, and includes a series of presentations in a “Communities Conference” at Rollins College and in Eatonville.

Presenters at this year’s event include poet Sonia Sanchez; producer, recording artist, and actor David Banner; host of the NPR program 1A, Joshua Johnson; and Senator Bob Graham. The popular HATitude luncheon features fashion and food, and the exhibit “An Eatonville Remembrance” is at the Hurston Museum.

The three day Outdoor Festival portion of the event on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday features vendors selling original arts and crafts, food vendors with fried fish and other festival food, and musical performances throughout each day including headliners The Zapp Band, and The Motown Tribute Review.

Eatonville is the oldest incorporated African American municipality in the United States. Growing up in the all black town had a profound effect on Zora Neale Hurston’s attitudes about race that can be seen in her work.

“We say that Zora Neale Hurston and the Eatonville community are two sides of the same hand,” says N.Y. Nathiri, executive director of the Association to Preserve the Eatonville Community. “For Zora Neale Hurston, Eatonville represents the quintessential cultural impact that people of African ancestry, particularly rural southern people in this country, contribute to the culture of the United States.”

In the 1930s and ‘40s, writer, folklorist, and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston was a celebrated figure of the Harlem Renaissance. Hurston is best remembered for her 1937 novel “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” the story of Eatonville resident Janie Crawford and her attempts at self-realization.

“’Their Eyes Were Watching God’ is history, it’s fiction, it’s pathos, it’s tragedy, all rolled up together in one incredible literary gem,” says Florence Turcotte, literary manuscripts archivist at the University of Florida’s P.K. Yonge Library of Florida History. “Making history come alive is sort of what I like to do, and that’s what excites me about Zora, is that she fictionalized real life and said a lot about the human condition, and a lot about life in Florida during her stay here.”

Hurston’s other novels include “Jonah’s Gourd Vine,” the story of an unfaithful man with an understanding wife; “Moses: Man of the Mountain,” a retelling of the biblical story of Moses; and “Seraph on the Suwanee,” Hurston’s only book that features white people as main characters. Hurston also wrote dozens of short stories, essays, and dramatic works.

Hurston’s literary career began even before she graduated from Barnard College in 1927. In 1925, her short essay “Spunk” was included in a respected anthology called “The New Negro.” While attending college in New York, Hurston worked with Harlem Renaissance contemporaries including Langston Hughes and Wallace Thurman on the literary magazine “Fire!”

After earning her Bachelor of Arts degree in anthropology, Hurston continued her graduate studies at Columbia University. As an anthropologist who studied under the renowned Franz Boas, Hurston published two collections of folklore. “Tell My Horse” looks at life in Haiti and Jamaica, including the practice of Voodoo. She wrote the book “Mules and Men” while living in Brevard County, in Eau Gallie.

“The book ‘Mules and Men’ was published in 1935, and was essentially a non-fiction account of Hurston’s adventures and experiences as a folklorist and anthropologist, in the late 1920s and early 1930s,” says Virginia Lynn Moylan, author of the book “Zora Neale Hurston’s Final Decade.” “The first section is devoted to her experiences in Eatonville collecting folklore, and includes 70 of her glorious folktales, including ‘Why Women Always Take Advantage of Men.’ The second section covers the period that she did research in New Orleans, into Hoodoo religion and practices. Today, it is still considered the preeminent collection of African American folklore.”

By the time Hurston died in 1960, she was broke, forgotten, and her books were out of print. Today, she is recognized as an important writer whose work is taught in classrooms around the world.

“Work that is truly of merit, lives,” says N.Y. Nathiri. “Today, Zora Neale Hurston’s work, her literature, her genius, is acknowledged and celebrated throughout the literary world.”

Since 1906, people have gathered at Spring Bayou in Tarpon Springs each January 6th to watch young men compete to find a submerged wooden cross. Today, thousands attend the ceremony. The unique Epiphany celebration is one example of the Greek culture that is still prevalent in Tarpon Springs.

In the city of Tarpon Springs you can listen to Greek music played on a bouzouki, try the pastry baklava, have a meal of lamb stew or a Greek seafood dish, sip the licorice flavored alcoholic beverage ouzo, and enjoy many other aspects of traditional Greek culture.

You can see the Neo-Byzantine style architecture of St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church, and watch the sponge divers unload their catch on the city dock downtown.

Tarpon Springs has the largest percentage of Greek Americans of any city in the United States.

“Even today, after people have been here four or five generations, there is still a big segment of the population that speaks Greek,” says Tina Bucuvalas, curator of arts and history for the City of Tarpon Springs.

When the first Greeks came to Tarpon Springs in 1905, a thriving town was already in place.

When Hamilton Disston bought 4 million acres of land for 25 cents per acre in 1881, it included the land that would become Tarpon Springs. To stimulate development, Disston brought businessman Anton Safford to Tarpon Springs.

The Victorian home that Safford lived in can be visited today. The Safford House Museum features period furniture and original family artifacts that present the home as it was in 1883.

The Orange Belt Railway came to town in 1887. The train depot is now a museum.

“The building we’re in was built in 1909 because the original railroad station burned down in 1908. This was restored in 2005,” says Sharon Sawyer of the Tarpon Springs Area Historical Society.

“The railroad was brought here by Peter Demens. He brought the railroad from Sanford to Tarpon Springs and then on down to St. Petersburg. Before the railroad came, everybody had to get here by boat or wagon, so the railroad in 1887 made a big difference here in town.”

It was the sponge industry that really put Tarpon Springs on the map.

By the mid-1800s, there was a thriving sponge industry in the Florida Keys, but by the early 1900s, Tarpon Springs was the largest sponge port in the United States.

While sponges in the Keys were harvested with long poles, in Tarpon Springs, Greek sponge divers donned canvas suits with round metal helmets.

“John Cocoris realized that the way that sponges were harvested in Greece would produce far more than the hooking methods they were using in Florida,” says Tina Bucuvalas.

“They brought over Greeks. At first 500 came in 1905, and then within a couple of years there were 1,500, and there were a lot of boats. It very quickly made Tarpon Springs the Sponge Capital of the World. Tarpon Springs was a big, important town at a time when St. Petersburg was a wide spot in the road.”

With the large influx of Greek sponge divers and their families to Tarpon Springs, businesses and institutions to serve them were established, including restaurants, grocery stores, bakeries, and coffee houses.

Today, Tarpon Springs retains a distinctive European flavor.

“They get up in the morning and have Greek food, and sweep out their courtyards which have various plants you might see in Greece,” says Bucuvalas. “They’ll have their coffee outside. The old ladies in their head scarves will be going over to St. Michael’s Chapel or St. Nicholas, or down to the bakery.”

St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church was constructed in 1907 and expanded in 1943 with marble imported from Greece.

The unique Epiphany celebration held each January 6th attracts people from around the world. Following a ceremony at the church, the congregation walks to the dock at Spring Bayou, where a wooden cross is thrown into the water. The young man who retrieves the cross is believed to bring special blessings to his family for the year.

The Patriarch of Constantinople, the Greek Orthodox equivalent of Catholicism’s Pope, came to Tarpon Springs in 2006 for the 100^th anniversary of the town’s Epiphany ceremony.

Florida used to be located at the South Pole.

As part of the continent Gondwana 650 million years ago, the foundation of Florida was tucked between the land masses that would become South America and Africa. The rest of eastern North America was then part of another continent called Laurentia. As the Earth’s tectonic plates shifted, the basement rocks of our modern continents moved across the globe.

About 300 million years ago, Gondwana and Laurentia collided, forming the Appalachian Mountains in what would become North America and the Mauritanide Mountains in what would eventually be Africa. The Florida portion of Gondwana joined with Laurentia at a line that runs southwest to northeast through modern south Alabama, south Georgia, southern South Carolina, and eastern North Carolina.

By about 200 million years ago, Gondwana and Laurentia had sutured together to form the supercontinent Pangea. At this point Florida’s basement rock was located north of the equator, much closer to its current position, but was surrounded by land. Florida was near the middle of the Pangea supercontinent, far from any ocean, probably surrounded by desert. Pangea did not last long from a geological perspective, breaking up after just 85 million years.

The breakup of Pangea resulted in the creation of Florida as a peninsula.

“North America separated from Africa, South America separated from Africa, Europe and Asia did their own thing, India broke away and slammed into the south side of Asia, creating the Himalaya mountains,” says Albert C. Hine, professor of Marine Science at the University of South Florida and author of the book “Geologic History of Florida: Major Events That Formed the Sunshine State.”

“So it was a period of time where there was a significant reorganization of the continental masses on earth, and during that time the basement rocks that created the Florida peninsula were isolated and left alone, and then on top of the basement rocks, the limestones have accumulated that we see, and the rocks and sediments that we see that form our beaches have occurred over the past 200 million years,” Hine says.

For tens of millions of years, most of Florida was separated from the rest of North America by the Georgia Channel Seaway. Eventually, the water receded and Florida became a visible extension of North America, but with a distinctly different foundation than the rest of the continent. The Suwannee Basin and the Florida-Bahama Blocks that make up the foundation of the Florida peninsula have much more in common with the rocks of northwest Africa than with the bedrock of the rest of North America.

At different points in geologic history, Florida has been totally submerged, but it has also been twice as wide as it is now.

“During glacial events, the huge ice sheet, it’s called the Laurentide Ice Sheet, covered most of North America, and the Fenno-Scandanavian Ice Sheet covered most of Europe,” says Hine. “Water was extracted from the ocean and snowed on land. Over thousands of years, that snow built up into thick ice sheets. So water was withdrawn from the ocean as much as 400 feet. So sea level dropped about 400 feet, 130 meters. As a result, Florida being topographically low and flat, that exposed a huge portion of the Florida platform to the air, and became dry.”

Prehistoric animals and probably Pre-Columbian people lived on dry land that is now submerged under 200 feet of water in the Gulf of Mexico.

Hine says that rising sea levels are an inevitable part of Florida’s future.

“It’s a function of global warming and global climate change,” says Hine. “Scientists realize, of course, it’s been politicized, to our chagrin, but the data are real, and the predictive models are the best we can possibly make them, and they’re getting better with time. That’s been demonstrated. All that clearly shows that sea level is going to rise in Florida in time periods that are important to humans. Not thousands of years or millions of years, but in decades. As a result, we have to start to plan how we’re going to deal with that. As we’re planning, we continue to try to make the science better, and to make the predictions better.”

On Christmas night 1951, a bomb exploded under the Mims home of educator and civil rights activist Harry T. Moore. The blast was so loud it could be heard several miles away in Titusville.

Moore died while being transported to Sanford, the closest place where a black man could be hospitalized. His wife Harriette died nine days later from injuries sustained in the blast.

The couple celebrated their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary on the day of the explosion, and Harriette lived just long enough to see her husband buried.

The Moore’s daughter, Juanita Evangeline Moore, was working in Washington, D.C. in 1951, and was scheduled to come home for the holidays on December 27th, aboard a train called the Silver Meteor. She did not hear the news about her family home being bombed until she arrived.

“When I got off the train in Titusville, I knew something was very, very wrong,” Moore said in an interview before her death in October 2015. “I had not turned on radio or television, so I didn’t know a thing about it until I got off the train. I noticed that my mother and father were not in front of all my relatives to greet me and they were always there.”

Moore was given the news by her Uncle George, who was home on leave from Korea.

“We got into his car and got settled, and the first thing I asked was ‘Well, where’s Mom and Dad?’ No one said anything for a while, it was complete silence. Finally, Uncle George turned around and he said ‘Well, Van, I guess I’m the one who has to tell you. Your house was bombed Christmas night. Your Dad is dead and your Mother is in the hospital.’ That’s the way I found out,” said Moore.

“I’ve never gotten over it. It was unbelievable.”

Moore insisted on being taken to her parent’s home. The blast had done extensive damage. She saw a huge hole in the floor of her parent’s room, into which their broken bed had collapsed. Wooden beams had fallen from the ceiling. Shards of broken glass covered the bed in the room she shared with her sister, Peaches.

Harry T. Moore was born November 18, 1905, in Houston, Florida, located in Suwannee County. At age 19, Moore graduated with a high school diploma from Florida Memorial College where he was a straight-A student, except for a B+ in French. Other students called him “Doc” because he did so well in all of his classes.

Moore moved to Mims in 1925 after being offered a job to teach fourth grade at the “colored school” in Cocoa. He met Harriette Vida Sims. They married and had two daughters. Moore, his wife, and both of their daughters graduated from Bethune-Cookman College in Daytona.

As a ninth grade teacher and principal at Titusville Negro School, Moore instilled in his students a sense of pride and a solid work ethic. A popular and skilled educator, Moore was fired for attempting to equalize pay for African American teachers in Brevard County.

Moore led a highly successful effort to expand black voter registration throughout the state, dramatically increased membership in the Florida branch of the NAACP, worked for equal justice for African Americans, and actively sought punishment for those who committed crimes against them.

“I do remember a lot of NAACP work with my Dad from the time I was able to understand what was going on,” said Juanita Evangeline Moore. “I helped him a lot with his mailing lists. We had a one-hand operated ditto machine. He usually typed out the stencil and he ran off whatever material he wanted to send out.”

Although the murders of Harry T. and Harriette V. Moore have never been solved, it is believed that members of the Ku Klux Klan from Apopka and Orlando planted the bomb on Christmas night.

Moore and his wife were killed 12 years before Medgar Evers, 14 years before Malcolm X, and 17 years before Martin Luther King, Jr., making them the first martyrs of the contemporary civil rights movement.

The Moore Cultural Complex in Mims features a civil rights museum and a replica of the Moore family home.

When you read the terms “digital history” or “digital humanities,” you might think of online access to scanned primary source documents such as journals, photographs, or maps. While that’s important, there’s much more to digital history.

“We can interact with the public in a way we couldn’t before,” says Connie Lester, director of the RICHES Project in the public history program at the University of Central Florida, an interdisciplinary effort that records and preserves the documents and stories of Florida communities, businesses, and institutions.

“The public then becomes involved in the collection and interpretation of the history,” says Lester. “The digital tools allow us to do that. The digital tools allow us to see things that are hard to explain in a text fashion.”

Historians and their students are creating exciting digital history and humanities projects using cutting edge technology such as new audio visual recording and editing software to create podcasts and blogs; and 3-D imaging of objects, artifacts, and historic sites.

The University of South Florida St. Petersburg has posted online a 3-D image of the Cocoa Canoe, recently uncovered by hurricane Irma. Anyone can find the image online and spin the canoe around to view it from any angle.

Laurie Taylor, digital history librarian at the University of Florida, has helped to create interactive maps of Florida and the Caribbean.

“Digital history and digital humanities is opening up possibilities for all of us,” says Taylor. “With new tools, with new resources, we can bring those to bear using our humanities expertise which is speculative, which is imaginative, which is creative.”

“These powerful new tools allow us to look at big data sets and look for patterns, hidden patterns, in texts, in data, and that’s exciting because this is work we could not do without a computer,” says Scot French, professor of digital and public history at the University of Central Florida. “One of our M.A. thesis candidates, Holly Baker, is doing a really exciting project where she’s tracking the song collecting journeys of Zora Neale Hurston and others in the 1930s around the state of Florida. Using a digital mapping interface, you can actually follow these journeys, click, listen to the music, listen to the interviews, see the photographs, and get a sense of what it was like to move around Florida, virtually.”

J. Michael Francis, professor of history at the University of South Florida St. Petersburg, specializes in Spanish colonial history. He has helped to develop La Florida Digital Interactive Archive.

“This is simply a different method of delivery of content,” says Francis. “We hope to drive an audience that might not pick up a book about colonial Florida, but might be willing to engage with a website. Might be willing to watch a video and then start to pose questions and maybe dig a little deeper. We would like to have all students have access to this material.”

Students at Rollins College, under the direction of history professor Julian Chambliss, have engaged in a variety of digital history projects. Perhaps most notable is the online reconstruction of an African American newspaper called the Winter Park Advocate, which was believed to have been lost. Chambliss and his students found two complete issues of the paper in local archives, as well as scrapbooks of articles from the paper to create a new digital resource.

“Increasingly in my classes we work on creating,” says Chambliss. “What can we create and distill from our interpretation of the primary sources. So we might make posters, we might do audio documentaries, we might try to reconstitute something that’s in fragments, digitally. All those are opportunities for the students to synthesize the information, and it’s like a proof of learning, a proof of concept, that they understand what these primary sources represent in the broader historical narrative.”

Traditional historical research involves physically going to libraries and archives to crack open old books, and wade through archival boxes of primary source documents. It can be a thrilling tactile experience. Digital historians say that’s not going away.

“For one thing, everything hasn’t been digitized,” says Connie Lester. “There is something about seeing the document, about holding it in your hand that is awe inspiring.”

The small town of Palatka, Florida is about 60 miles south of Jacksonville, 45 miles east of Gainesville, and 29 miles southwest of St. Augustine. It’s the home of St. Johns River State College and the Florida School of the Arts, headquarters of the St. Johns Water Management District, and the site of Ravine Gardens State Park.

A quiet little town today, Palatka has a rich and colorful history.

“I’m a fifth generation on my mother’s side, born and raised in Palatka,” says Larry Beaton, historian of the Putnam County Historical Society. “My great-great grandfather was Robert Raymond Reid, who was the son of the fourth territorial governor, and he came here to Palatka in the early 1850s.”

Beaton’s maternal grandmother lived to be over 100 years old, and would entertain her grandchildren with stories of how she remembered Palatka as a little girl.

“She remembered walking along the riverfront with her mother and she said that the river was just like a highway,” says Beaton. “She said any direction you looked there were boats coming or going to the docks at Palatka bringing tourists and cargo.”

The Putnam Historic Museum is a small building, but is full of artifacts detailing Palatka’s long history. One exhibit shows how Native Americans were the first inhabitants of Palatka, as documented by naturalist William Bartram in 1774.

The British controlled Florida from 1763 to 1783. During that period an Englishman named Denys Rolle established Rollestown in what is now East Palatka. When the Spanish regained control of Florida in 1783, Rolle abandoned his settlement.

Florida became a United States Territory in 1821. It was during this period that Palatka developed as an active port community on the St. Johns River.

The Second Seminole War of the 1830s caused problems for Palatka as buildings were attacked and burned. In 1838, the U.S. Army established Fort Shannon to protect Palatka. The Putnam Historic Museum is one of the only original Army buildings from the Second Seminole War still in existence.

“This has been identified as the Officer’s Quarters for Fort Shannon,” says Beaton. “The building was originally down on the riverfront. The Putnam County Historical Society and the City of Palatka acquired the building in 1984, and had it moved to the site here next to the Bronson-Mulholland House.”

Florida became a state in 1845, supporting growth in Palatka. In 1849, Palatka was named Putnam County seat, and it was incorporated as a town in 1853. The following year, Judge Isaac H. Bronson built Sunny Point, now known as the Bronson-Mulholland House.

Over the century after it was built, the Bronson-Mulholland House changed hands many times. Abandoned during the Civil War, the house was used by Confederate soldiers as a lookout for Union gunboats, and later was used as a barracks for Union colored troops. In 1866, it became a school for children of freed slaves. Later serving as a rooming house, the property fell into disrepair in the mid-twentieth century. Plans were made to demolish the house and build a playground.

“That’s how the Putnam County Historical Society was formed, was to save the house from destruction,” says Beaton. “The city restored the house through a federal grant and now the house museum is a partnership between the City of Palatka and the Putnam County Historical Society. It’s been open for tours since 1977.”

In the decades following the Civil War, Palatka thrived. It was a popular tourist destination, particularly for those seeking health benefits from Florida’s climate. By the 1880s, Palatka was a transportation hub for railroad lines and steamboat traffic on the St. Johns River.

A fire nearly destroyed the town in 1884, but it rebounded. In 1893, Palatka’s Wilson Cypress Company became the second largest cypress mill in the world.

As the twentieth century approached, Palatka began losing its stature as a thriving city. The Big Freeze of 1894-95, devastated citrus crops.

“Also the railroads taking people further south and opening up the interior of Florida was kind of the beginning of the end of Palatka being a major tourist destination,” says Beaton.

Today, Palatka has a quaint historic ambience with buildings preserved and restored in two nationally designated historic districts.

On November 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy was shot and killed as his motorcade drove through Dallas, Texas.

President Kennedy spent the week before his death in Florida.

After a short stay at his family’s winter residence in Palm Beach, Kennedy toured the NASA facilities at Cape Canaveral before visiting Tampa and Miami.

On his last day in Florida, President Kennedy met with Florida historian and Catholic priest Michael Gannon. As the first and only Catholic American president, Kennedy was particularly interested in Gannon’s area of expertise, Catholicism in Spanish Colonial Florida.

When Gannon spoke with President Kennedy on November 18, 1963, he was a priest in St. Augustine, preparing to celebrate the 400^th anniversary of the founding of the city.

“At the old mission where the first Parrish Mass was celebrated on September 8, 1565, it was decided to build a cross,” Gannon said. The cross was to be built on the site where Don Pedro Menéndez de Avilés first landed to settle St. Augustine, and where Father Francisco López observed the city’s first Catholic Mass.

“Ultimately it was constructed of stainless steel and rose to a height of 208 feet. I think it’s very impressive. It can be seen 14 miles out to sea. It has become a symbol of the first mission to the North American Natives and the first Parrish established by Europeans in this country,” said Gannon.

Also part of St. Augustine’s 400^th anniversary celebration in 1965 was the expansion and redecorating of the cathedral church, the construction of a contemporary church called The Prince of Peace, and a bridge linking the new church with the historic mission grounds.

President Kennedy’s Catholicism had been an issue during his election campaign, and he gave a national speech on the topic to reassure voters.

Spain controlled Florida for nearly three centuries. Gannon told Kennedy about the extensive and complex history of Catholicism in Florida.

“Everywhere Spain moved politically and economically and militarily, the church moved, too,” said Gannon.

“The church was always a partner of Spanish expansion. The church was on the forefront. If you want to select any part of the Spanish cultural presence in Florida and the rest of North America, you would have to say that the church was in advance of all other institutions.”

The Florida Chamber of Commerce arranged the meeting between Gannon and Kennedy as St. Augustine was preparing for its 400^th anniversary celebration.

“It was hoped by the Chamber of Commerce and by the city fathers in St. Augustine, that the president would agree to come down earlier rather than later,” said Gannon.

“It was uncertain if he would be elected to a second term, so they wanted him to come while president and to build up interest in the city that would help generate tourist traffic for the 400^th year.”

It was arranged for Gannon to meet the president at the MacDill Air Force Base Officer’s Club.

“I brought him a photographic copy of the oldest written record of American origin, which was a Parrish Register of Matrimonial Sacrament, a marriage between two Spaniards, a man and a woman, here in the city of St. Augustine, dated 1594,” said Gannon.

“He seemed to be very grateful to receive the gift of the photographic copy that was beautifully framed.”

President Kennedy was intrigued by Gannon’s stories about the oldest continuously occupied European city in what would become the United States.

“As he left he said ‘I’ll keep in touch.’” Gannon said, pausing to recall the moment. “But four days later he was dead.”

Michael Gannon retired from the priesthood in 1976, but continued his illustrious career as one of Florida’s most respected historians and educators, teaching at the University of Florida.

Gannon’s best known non-fiction book is “The Cross in the Sand,” written in 1965 and republished in 1999. He was editor of and contributor to the book “The History of Florida,” originally published in 1996 and revised in 2013. Gannon’s creative work includes the 1994 novel “Secret Missions” set in Florida during World War II, and the play “My Friend Zelma: Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings on Trial.”

Gannon died in Gainesville in April 2017, at the age of 89.

Tradition holds that the first Thanksgiving was celebrated in 1621, as English Pilgrims at Plymouth Plantation in Massachusetts shared a bountiful harvest with their Native American neighbors.

The first Thanksgiving celebration in North America actually took place in Florida.

Fifty-five years before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock, colonists in St. Augustine shared a feast of thanksgiving with Native Americans.

Florida historian Michael Gannon, who died on April 10, 2017 at the age of 89, found documents supporting Florida’s claim to the “real” first Thanksgiving celebration.

“Not until 42 years later would English Jamestown be founded,” Gannon said. “Not until 56 years later would the Pilgrims in Massachusetts observe their famous Thanksgiving. St. Augustine’s settlers celebrated the nation’s first Thanksgiving over a half century earlier, on September 8, 1565. Following a religious service, the Spaniards shared a communal meal with the local native tribe.”

Hosting the first Thanksgiving celebration in what would become the United States is one of many “firsts” for the oldest continuously occupied European settlement in America, founded 452 years ago.

“When the Spaniards founded St. Augustine, they proceeded to found our nation’s first city government, first school, first hospital, first city plan, first Parrish church, and first mission to the native populations,” Gannon said.

In 1965, Gannon was a priest and historian in St. Augustine, leading several projects to help celebrate the 400^th anniversary of the founding of the city. He oversaw the erection of the Great Cross on the site of the first religious service and thanksgiving feast in North America. At 208 feet tall, the stainless steel structure is the largest freestanding cross in the Western Hemisphere.

“It was decided to build a cross, because that was central to the original ceremony, where Father Francisco López, the fleet chaplain, soon to be first pastor of the first Parrish, came ashore ahead of Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, the leader of the founding expedition, and then went forward to meet Menéndez holding a cross,” said Gannon. “Menéndez came on land, knelt and kissed the cross.”

Every year, the September 8, 1565 landing of Menéndez and the Catholic Mass that followed is reenacted in St. Augustine with dignitaries from around the world in attendance.

Today, visitors to the first permanent European settlement in North America can see a statue of Father Francisco López in front of the Great Cross. The statue is placed on the approximate site where Father López held the first Catholic Mass in the city, which was attended by Native Americans. Following the service, the European settlers and the native people shared a Thanksgiving meal.

The statue of Father López is carved out of indigenous coquina stone, a sedimentary rock comprised of compressed shells. The rough surface of the coquina symbolizes the difficult journey the Spanish endured on their voyage to Florida.

“That statue was erected in the 1950s. It was executed by a distinguished Yugoslav sculptor, Ivan Meštrović,” said Gannon. “But it was placed in a copse of trees where it did not stand out against a dark background. The plan that the architects in 1965 came forward with was to move it to a site on open ground where the figure of Father López, with his arms in the air, would stand out against the sky. And now, at long last, the statue has been moved to that space. You can see the dramatic difference in the figure of Father López as he’s seen completely and clearly now against the sky, and directly in front of the Great Cross, which stands behind him.”

The Spanish had only just arrived in St. Augustine when their Thanksgiving dinner was served, and they did not have the benefit of having raised crops for a year as the English Pilgrims did more than half a century later.

The Spanish had to do the best they could with leftovers from their long voyage.

“The menu was a stew of salted pork and garbanzo beans, accompanied with ship’s bread and red wine,” said Gannon.

While Floridians should proudly proclaim ownership of the first Thanksgiving celebration held in what would become the United States, we may want to retain the traditional menu of turkey, stuffing, vegetables, and cranberry sauce.

People often think of history as permanent, unchangeable, and irrefutable; a static set of facts that can never change.

Contrary to popular belief, history is constantly changing.

These revisions of history become necessary when new primary source documents are discovered that contradict long held assumptions, or well-known primary sources are reevaluated with fresh eyes and new conclusions are reached. Over time, societal norms evolve and change, providing historians different lenses through which to view the past.

Sometimes, particularly with local histories, ideas about the past can become entrenched in our collective consciousness as stories are passed down from generation to generation, and repeated as fact by new generations of historians.

Last week in this column, we discussed the last naval battle of the American Revolution. All of the details of the battle presented in the article are verifiable and undisputed, except for one.

Did that battle actually take place off of Cape Canaveral?

According to a state historic marker:

“The last naval battle of the American Revolutionary War took place off the coast of Cape Canaveral on March 10, 1783. The fight began when three British ships sighted two Continental Navy ships, the Alliance commanded by Captain John Barry, and the Duc De Lauzun commanded by Captain John Green sailing northward along the coast of Florida.”

The marker goes on to explain how the American ships were carrying 72,000 Spanish silver dollars from Havana, Cuba to Philadelphia to support the Continental Army. The British ships chased the Americans south. The British ship Sybil, commanded by Captain James Vashon, attacked the Duc De Lauzun. The Alliance came to the rescue of the Duc De Lauzun, and defeated the Sybil. After the British retreated, the Americans successfully completed their mission.

Brevard County Historical Commissioner Molly Thomas has done extensive research into this battle for a series of articles appearing in the Indian River Journal. Although she was hoping to support the story of the battle occurring off of Cape Canaveral, that’s not what happened.

“In the myriad of sources consulted for this series, very few actually mention Cape Canaveral,” says Thomas. “Only two of them, in fact. Neither of them are direct primary sources, and one of them actually makes its allusion to Cape Canaveral by referencing the other source in the footnotes.”

The 1938 biographical narrative “Gallant John Barry, 1745-1803: The Story of a Naval Hero of Two Wars” was written by William B. Clark using Captain John Barry’s personal papers. In his description of the battle, Clark places the British ships “some 30 leagues southeast of Cape Canaveral.”

As Thomas points out, 30 leagues is 103.57 miles, and Captain Barry’s own account places the Alliance six or seven miles southwest of that location.

“From that moment, they promptly turned around and headed south-southwest for nearly five hours,” says Thomas. “They could have traveled nearly 50 miles during that five hour chase, which actually puts the last battle of the American Revolution somewhere between West Palm Beach and Boca Raton, Florida. Even for the most enthusiastic local historian to say that this location, (more than 140 miles to the southeast) is ‘off the coast of Cape Canaveral’ seems a bit of a stretch.”

The confusion in the popular narrative probably comes from Captain Barry, and later his biographer William B. Clark, using Cape Canaveral as a reference point in their descriptions of the battle.

“For several hundred years, Cape Canaveral was the only noteworthy landmark along the Florida coast between the Keys and St. Augustine that sailors could use to gauge their whereabouts or help them explain where they were when something happened,” says Thomas. “As William Clark had direct access to Barry’s papers, he had to have seen the name Cape Canaveral somewhere in his collection in order to incorporate it into his narrative. Unfortunately, it was likely only mentioned as a landmark.”

Historians are beginning to reassess the overlooked but important role that Florida played in the American Revolution, particularly as a Loyalist stronghold controlled by the British throughout the war.

The last naval battle of the American Revolution is still a part of Florida history, even if the conflict took place about 140 miles south of Cape Canaveral.