The Monday, December 8, 1941, Orlando Morning Sentinel “Extra” edition had a one word headline in bright red block letters nearly four inches tall: WAR.

Front page articles detailed the attack on Pearl Harbor, described the imminent declaration of war on Japan, and outlined what retaliation for the attack might look like.

The paper’s front page editorial stated, “This may be a long war. It may last for years. It may, probably will, involve us in actual fighting with Germany and Italy.”

The editorial went on to say, “That means sacrifice. That means that every soldier, every seaman must do his duty and be ready to answer any call. That means the citizen must give up his ideas of profit and easy living. That means the man…in every walk of life must surrender his own plans and purposes in answer to the great call of country and of freedom.”

Young men in Brevard County were ready to answer the call.

“I remember a friend that used to hunt with my dad that came by the house, and he told us about Pearl Harbor,” says lifelong Brevard County resident George L. “Speedy” Harrell, who was 14 years old in 1941. “A lot of people enlisted in the service right away.”

Harrell was too young to serve in the military immediately after Pearl Harbor, instead earning the nickname “Speedy” playing football as a freshman at Cocoa High School. He remembers everybody making sacrifices during wartime.

“The rationing of everything was set up to conserve what we had,” says Harrell. “Gasoline was rationed weekly based on need. I was a growing boy with big feet, and would have to go to the Rationing Board and explain that I needed a new pair of shoes to get it. Tires for your automobile, you had to go before the Rationing Board and show that you needed a new tire.”

Harrell turned 18 before the war ended, and was sent to serve the U.S. Army in Germany.

Immediately after the United States joined World War II, German submarines began attacking supply ships off the coast of Florida.

“Many cargo ships were sunk off Cape Canaveral and Cocoa Beach by German U-Boats,” said Brevard County resident Bob Cowart in 1988. “The cargo vessels liked to hug the coastline as much as possible in their north-south routes. Since they had to swing far offshore in order to avoid the shallow water off the Cape, that area became one of the favorite spots for the German submarines to torpedo them.”

On May 1, 1942, less than five months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the British freighter La Paz was torpedoed off Cape Canaveral and towed to Cocoa Beach, where it sank. The stern of the ship rested on the bottom of the ocean, but the bow was visible above the water. The La Paz was raised, towed to Jacksonville, repaired, and returned to service during the war.

“I had the privilege of working on the salvage operation, along with other local 16 and 17 year olds, and will always remember this as a great experience for a kid of that age,” said Cowart.

Many Brevard County residents remember fondly how 900 cases of Johnny Walker Scotch whiskey was “rescued” from the La Paz and brought ashore for locals to enjoy.

Most ships were not salvageable after being torpedoed by the Germans, but their crews were often able to escape on lifeboats. The refugees would travel through Merritt Island and Cocoa on their way home.

“I remember talking to one seaman who said that he had made three voyages out of New York, and that Cocoa Beach was the furthest south he had come before being torpedoed,” Cowart said.

Not all of the crew members of torpedoed ships were so lucky. One ill-fated lifeboat was displayed at the corner of Brevard Avenue and King Street in Cocoa.

“It was riddled with bullet holes by a German sub which surfaced and machine gunned the helpless survivors in the lifeboat,” said Cowart. “Twelve men died in the lifeboat.”

The attack on Pearl Harbor brought the United States into a global conflict that was partially fought along the coast of Brevard County.

The beautifully landscaped streets of Coral Gables are lined with Mediterranean style buildings that have become a preferred form of Florida architecture. The affluent Miami suburb is recognized as an iconic planned community.

Coral Gables was the vision of George Merrick, who in the 1920s transformed his family’s citrus grove into a community that included what was then middle class housing, public recreational facilities such as the Venetian Pool, trolley transportation, the Biltmore Hotel, and an educational institution that would become the University of Miami.

Miami historian Arva Moore Parks has spent decades working to preserve the Coral Gables community. She is author of the award-winning book “George Merrick: Son of the Southwind, Visionary Creator of Coral Gables,” published by University Press of Florida.

“I moved into Coral Gables in 1970, and bought an old beat up house, and everybody thought I was crazy,” says Parks. She soon found herself leading the first Historic Preservation Board in South Florida. “That’s when I started learning about Coral Gables. When we worked to save the Merrick House, I got to know Richard Merrick, who was George Merrick’s youngest brother. His wife Mildred was a librarian at UM, who I’d known for a long time. About ten years ago she said ‘I have some material no one’s ever seen,’ and that is what prompted the writing of the book.”

Parks was given exclusive access to primary source documents including personal letters, notes about Coral Gables, and short stories written by George Merrick.

Parks found the short stories particularly intriguing. “I recognized immediately that they were eyewitness accounts, because he was 13 when he came here,” says Parks. “He fictionalized what he witnessed. Sometimes he changed the names, but I could recognize who he was talking about.”

In 1899, George Merrick’s family moved from Duxbury, Massachusetts to Miami, Florida, to participate in the citrus industry. The pioneering spirit of his family helped to inspire the 13 year old.

“When he got here, everybody had to learn,” says Parks. “His father and mother were both college graduates and they moved into the back country into an old homestead, because his father wanted to leave the ministry and raise grapefruit. They became pioneers, but they had a very different background. They were intellectual college graduates in an era when there weren’t a lot of those around.”

As a young man, George Merrick dreamed of transforming his family’s land into a beautiful, planned community. His goal was to create an affordable place to live with public infrastructure to benefit residents.

“He was very visual and he read all the time,” says Parks. “He loved Washington Irving’s ‘Alhambra’ and that’s where he got a lot of ideas.”

While attending college in New York, Merrick lived with his mother’s brother, Denman Fink, who was an illustrator and artist. The two began discussing the possibilities for a planned community with architectural controls. After continuing his college education at Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida, Merrick returned to South Florida.

Merrick assembled a team that included his cousin George Fink who was an architect, and Frank Button who was a landscape architect working nearby for the Deering family. Together they designed the original plan for Coral Gables. The team planted more than 30,000 trees to augment the Mediterranean style architecture of the community.

The Florida Land Boom of the 1920s was followed by a bust, and then the Great Depression. George Merrick lost his fortune.

“He was literally thrown out in 1928,” says Parks. “They had created a city and he was on the commission, but he was having some health problems. They threw him off the commission because he missed too many meetings.”

As the Great Depression hit, Merrick’s properties were being foreclosed and he never recovered financially. In 1940, he was able to become Post Master, and was very popular in the position. At his death in 1942, Merrick’s estate was worth less than $400.

Merrick’s legacy lives on in the community of Coral Gables.

“It’s been very successful,” says Parks. “The values have gone up. I think people realize that it is the architectural controls more than anything else, that have kept the feeling in Coral Gables today.”

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.”

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.

“Not until 42 years later would English Jamestown be founded,” says eminent Florida historian Michael Gannon. “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 451 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 says.

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,” says 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. For many years the role of Menéndez has been played by Chad Light.

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,” says 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,” says 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.

The Chicago Cubs won the 2016 World Series Championship. The Cubs came back from a 3-1 game deficit to play a full series of 7 games. The final game required an extra tenth inning for the Cubs to defeat the Cleveland Indians in a dramatic 8-7 finish, following a rain delay. The win ended a 108-year drought for the Cubs, the longest in Major League Baseball history.

The 1906 Cubs won a record setting 116 of 154 games played that season. The team was the first to play in three consecutive World Series Championships, and the first to win twice in a row, in 1907 and 1908.

The last time that the Cubs won the World Series, in 1908, Joe Tinker was an important player on the team. Tinker has strong ties to Central Florida, and played a key role in the development of the Orlando area.

From 1902-1912, Cubs shortstop Joe Tinker, second baseman Johnny Evers, and first baseman Frank Chance perfected a double play combination that helped to defeat opposing teams. The 1910 poem “Baseball’s Sad Lexicon” by Franklin Pierce Adams is written from the perspective of a New York Giants fan.

These are the saddest possible words:
“Tinker to Evers to Chance.”
Trio of bear cubs, and fleeter than birds,
Tinker and Evers and Chance.
Ruthlessly pricking our gonfalon bubble,
Making a Giant hit into a double—
Words that are heavy with nothing but trouble:
“Tinker to Evers to Chance.”

The three teammates were elected into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1946.

Tinker played for the Cubs from 1902-1913. After one season with the Cincinnati Reds, Tinker returned to the Cubs as a player and manager until 1916. After leaving the Cubs, Tinker was part owner and manager of a minor league team, the Columbus Senators.

Tinker’s wife had persistent health problems, and they decided to move to Orlando in 1920. Tinker became owner and manager of the Orlando Tigers.

“The Tigers were the second incarnation of Orlando’s initial baseball franchise,” says Michael Perkins, executive director of the Orange County Regional History Center. “They were the Caps in 1919 and ’20, then the Tigers in 1921, and then the Bulldogs in until 1924. All of the teams played Class C baseball in the Florida State League. The Tigers won the League under Tinker’s management in 1921.”

Using wealth he had acquired from a successful career in professional baseball, Tinker started a real estate company, buying and selling land in Orange County and Seminole County. Tinker profited greatly from the Florida Land Boom of the 1920s. His offices were in the Tinker Building at 16 and 17 West Pine St. in Orlando, which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

“The Tinker Building cost Tinker $90,000 to build in 1925, an enormous sum for the time,” says Perkins. “It held his real estate offices for about two years before Florida’s economic collapse of 1927 caused the local real estate market to bust.”

Orlando’s Tinker Field, named after Joe Tinker, is adjacent to the Citrus Bowl. Tinker Field has served as the Spring Training home of the Brooklyn Dodgers, Cincinnati Reds, Washington Senators, and Minnesota Twins. It was also the original home field of the Orlando Rays. While not as iconic as the Cubs home at Wrigley Field in North Chicago, Orlando’s Tinker Field is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

On Christmas Day, 1923, Tinker’s wife Ruby committed suicide following an apparent nervous breakdown. In 1926, he was remarried to Mary Ross Eddington of Orlando.

“By 1930, he had lost his considerable fortune and actually went on a ten week theatrical tour of the country with a small troupe that included his old team mate, Johnny Evers,” says Perkins. “He spent the rest of his life in and around baseball, and helped convince the Cincinnati Reds and Washington Senators to hold their Spring Training games in Orlando.”

Tinker died of complications from diabetes in Orange Memorial Hospital on July 27, 1948, his 68^th birthday. He is buried in Orlando’s historic Greenwood Cemetery.

It’s been 108 years since the Chicago Cubs last won the World Series Championship, when Tinker played for the team.

Today, residents of Florida may be the ones to decide rather the next President of the United States is Hillary Rodham Clinton or Donald J. Trump.

Florida is one of a handful of “swing states” that helps to determine the outcome of our presidential elections. In recent decades, Florida’s 29 Electoral College votes have gone to both Democratic and Republican candidates, making the difference between victory and defeat for both political parties in national races for president.

As important as Florida has become to our presidential election process, there has never been a president, or even a vice-president, from Florida.

“Florida is the largest state in the Union to have never had a president,” said James C. Clark, author of the book Presidents in Florida: How the Presidents Have Shaped Florida and How Florida Has Influenced the Presidents. “Not only have we not ever had a president or a vice-president, we’ve never even had a nominee.”

Florida was a Spanish colony from 1565 to 1763. During the American Revolution, Florida was under British control and remained loyal to the king, while colonies to the north sought independence. By the time George Washington was sworn in as the first President of the United States in 1789, Florida was again under Spanish control.

In 1821, future president Andrew Jackson oversaw Florida’s transition from a Spanish colony to a United States Territory.

“Andrew Jackson comes mainly to fight Indians, and then becomes the Territorial Governor briefly, after Florida was acquired by the United States,” said Clark. “Future president Zachary Taylor comes to fight Indians in the Seminole Wars. Then Teddy Roosevelt comes on his way to Cuba [in 1898, to fight in the Spanish-American War]. So, in a way, three people have their presidential careers launched in Florida, even though none of them are from Florida.”

Chester A. Arthur was the first sitting president to come to Florida. In the 1880s, he enjoyed fishing at Reedy Creek. Eighty years later, Walt Disney would buy that property to create his Florida theme parks.

In the twentieth century, all U.S. presidents come to Florida, and some make the state their second home while in office.

Harry S. Truman spent so much time in his Key West home that it became known as “The Little White House.” John F. Kennedy wrote his book Profiles in Courage and his presidential inaugural address from his family home in Palm Beach. The Bush family, which includes two U.S. presidents, has vacationed regularly in Florida since George H.W. Bush was a child.

Senator George Smathers was a prominent figure in Florida and national politics. Early in the presidency of Richard M. Nixon, rumors circulated that he might appoint Smathers as attorney general. Smathers was waiting on a call from Nixon, expecting a job offer.

When the call from Nixon came, it was not what Smathers had hoped.

“When Nixon called, he asked if he would sell him his home in Key Biscayne,” said Clark. “Smathers said ‘yes’ and it became the Key Biscayne White House. Richard Nixon was there the weekend that the Watergate burglary took place.”

The burglary of the Democratic National Committee office at the Watergate building in Washington, D.C. led to the resignation of Nixon as president. It was during a press conference from the Contemporary Hotel at Walt Disney World that Nixon gave his infamous “I am not a crook” speech on November 18, 1973, at the height of the Watergate scandal.

As terrorists attacked the Twin Towers in New York City on September 11, 2001, President George W. Bush was reading to elementary school students in Sarasota, Florida.

Before becoming president in 1921, Warren G. Harding was a frequent visitor to Brevard County. Less than a month before being sworn in, Harding’s yacht Victoria was stuck for two days as he attempted to sail past Titusville on the way to Merritt Island.

“At one point, Harding got bored on the boat,” said Clark. “He rode ashore, took a taxi cab for a ride around, just to see what was happening, came back to the dock in Titusville, bought some mullet, and took it back to the ship for dinner. Can you imagine that happening today?”

William Bartram fought alligators, befriended Seminoles, and meticulously documented the flora and fauna of eighteenth century Florida.

His book “Travels through North and South Carolina, East and West Florida, the Cherokee Country, the Extensive Territories of the Muscogulges, or Creek Confederacy, and the Country of the Chactaws, Containing an Account of the Soil and Natural Productions of Those Regions, Together with Observations on the Manners of the Indians,” known today as “Bartram’s Travels,” is a classic work of Florida literature.

William Bartram was a naturalist, botanist, artist, and explorer who followed in the footsteps of his father, John Bartram.

“Without his father’s influence, William would have never gotten interested in botany,” says J.D. Sutton, actor and author of the one-man play “William Bartram: Puc Puggy’s Travels in Florida.”

“Following the French and Indian War when Spain ceded Florida to England, John Bartram had been named botanist to the King of England. He charged John to explore the Florida territory to see what might be there, what the potentials were in the country,” says Sutton.

In 1765, the 14 year old William Bartram joined his father on an expedition up the St. Johns River. William was so taken with Florida that he attempted to establish himself as a farmer at Fort Picolata, but the effort failed. He returned to Florida in 1774 as part of a four year trek through what is now the southeastern United States, documenting the plants, animals, and inhabitants of the region.

Bartram sailed to Amelia Island and toured Indian mounds. He took the Intracoastal Waterway to the St. Johns River, exploring the area that would become Jacksonville. He traveled up and down the St. Johns River and visited what are now Micanopy, the Paynes Prairie Preserve State Park, Astor, and Blue Spring. Later in 1774, he traveled the Suwannee River.

While collecting seeds and meticulously documenting Florida’s natural environment, Bartram interacted with Seminole Indians. He found the native population to be very friendly and welcoming. The Seminoles gave Bartram the nickname “Puc Puggy,” which means “flower hunter.”

“I think it was kind of a put down which he didn’t quite get,” says Sutton. “He was just honored to be named ‘the flower hunter’ by the chief, and given permission to explore the territory around Tuscawilla for collecting medicinal herbs and plants, and writing about them and identifying them, and sending them on to England and to his father’s garden in Philadelphia.”

Part of what makes Bartram’s “Travels” such a useful resource and engaging work today are its detailed drawings. Bartram was a skilled artist.

“He was a brilliant illustrator,” says Sutton. “His drawing of the franklinia tree that they found on the Altamaha River is probably his best known. But he did pages and pages of illustrations which were then hand-colored and sent to his patron in London. They’re still there in the British Museum.”

When Bartram’s “Travels” was first published in 1791, it was not universally praised. Some critics found the writing style overly Romantic. Some doubted the authenticity of Bartram’s accounts of his fighting with snakes and alligators, and his relations with the Seminoles. The Florida that Bartram described seemed so exotic to some readers that they compared his book to the fantasy “Gulliver’s Travels” by Jonathan Swift.

Bartram’s “Travels” is admired and respected by modern audiences.

“It’s a great time capsule of what Florida was like in the mid-1700s,” says Sutton.

“He talks about flocks of the Carolina parakeet so numerous they block the sun. We don’t have that anymore, because they’re extinct, but we’ve got that visual image of what it was like. He describes gopher tortoises, which they hadn’t seen before, that are so big that a man could stand on top of them. They’re wonderful images, and that’s what makes Bartram fun.”

J.D. Sutton will perform his one-man show “William Bartram: Puc Puggy’s Travels in Florida” at the Brevard Museum of History and Natural Science in Cocoa, Saturday, November 12, at 10am, as part of the Florida Frontiers Festival. Advance tickets to the festival are $10 for adults and $5 for children. Admission also includes musical performances, visual artists, vendors, demonstrators, food trucks, children’s activities, and access to the museum.

Aviles Street in St. Augustine is the oldest street in the United States. Many of the Spanish colonial buildings that line the narrow brick street now serve as museums or businesses catering to tourists.

On March 2, 1800, at about 5pm, two men had an altercation on Aviles Street that resulted in one of the men’s death.

“I’ve been researching criminal court cases from the colonial period for a while,” says James G. Cusick, curator of the P.K. Yonge Library of Florida History at the University of Florida. “I’ve looked at slanders, I’ve looked at a child abuse case, I’ve looked at a number of murders, and this one was very interesting to me.”

It was a Sunday afternoon and the shops on Aviles Street were closed. Several young apprentices were hanging out together, including free black teenager Jorge Fish and slave Marcelino Sánchez from the tailor shop, and their friend Juan Seguí, a slave from the bakery a few doors down. A slave named Benjamin was also part of the group.

As the young men were talking, a slave named Juan Carlos, who was trained as a cobbler, nodded to the group as he walked past.

“Benjamin broke off from the group, took off his shoes, and threw them up against the door of the tailor shop, took off his hat and threw it through the open window, took off after Juan Carlos, grabbed the hat off of Juan Carlos’s head, and got into a fight with him,” says Cusick.

Several women tried to break up the fight, including a 60 year-old slave named Amelia, a free black woman named Frances who sold pastries at a shop on Aviles Street, and Reyna, a free black woman about 30 years old.

The fight continued as Benjamin chased Juan Carlos into the courtyard of the Leonardi House, the home of a wealthy Italian family. Benjamin proceeded to overpower and brutally beat Juan Carlos. A free black merchant named José Bonam tried unsuccessfully to break up the fight.

As a crowd gathered, Benjamin eventually turned to walk away from the fight. The bloodied and beaten Juan Carols pulled a knife and fatally stabbed Benjamin twice in the back.

A soldier arrived and arrested Juan Carlos.

Juan Carlos was put on trial, but the process was not what we would expect today. Most people are familiar with procedural courtroom dramas like the television series “Law and Order” that reflect how our modern justice system works. A murder is followed by a police investigation, an arrest, and a trial.

“The way court proceedings worked in the Spanish colonial period was almost more like a police investigation than a trial,” says Cusick. “There was no court room, there was no judge, there was no witness stand. Everything was done by deposition. Unlike modern lawyers, these men had no idea what was going to come up in testimony. They were learning things as they went along.”

At first glance, this killing could have been seen as a case of self-defense, since Juan Carlos was attacked by Benjamin, but as testimony was gathered, some evidence indicated that this may have been a premeditated murder.

Juan Carlos believed that Benjamin was having an affair with his wife, Maria Agustina. Benjamin left his shoes and hat behind at Juan Carlos’s home. Juan Carlos slashed the shoes and hat with a knife in front of Benjamin’s friends, saying that the same would happen to their owner.

Despite possible mitigating circumstances, Juan Carlos was found guilty of the murder of Benjamin.

The verdict came with a harsh sentence. Juan Carlos was to be lashed 200 times. If he survived that, he would spend 10 years doing hard labor. In an unusual theatrical twist, Juan Carlos would endure his lashing at various points along Aviles Street, to ensure the biggest possible audience.

The Haitian Revolution was occurring in 1800, and there was concern about a similar slave revolt in the United States. “I can’t think of any other reason that the punishment would have been delivered in this way,” Cusick says.

Today, visitors to St. Augustine can walk down Aviles Street where some of the buildings associated with this case still stand.

The importance of Florida in early American history is often overlooked.

The so-called “thirteen original colonies” that would lead to the creation of the United States exclude the fourteenth and fifteenth colonies of East Florida and West Florida.

St. Augustine, Florida was an active city for more than four decades before the English established a settlement at Jamestown, Virginia in 1607.

The Spanish gave Florida its name in 1513, and established the first continuously occupied European settlement in what would become the United States in 1565. After two centuries under Spanish occupation, the British took control of Florida in 1763.

The British separated the area into East Florida, with its capital in St. Augustine, and West Florida, with its capital in Pensacola. Under British rule, East Florida consisted of what is the modern boundary of the state, east of the Apalachicola River. West Florida included the modern Panhandle of Florida, as well as parts of what are now Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama.

Roger Smith focused his doctoral studies at the University of Florida on the topic of Florida in the American Revolution.

“On August 11, 1776, when news of the Declaration of Independence became known in St. Augustine, they became so incensed that they made effigies of John Hancock and Samuel Adams and hung them in the trees in St. Augustine Plaza and set them on fire,” Smith says. “This colony was adamantly loyal when the war broke out.”

At the start of the American Revolution in 1776, East Florida and West Florida were the only two southern colonies that remained loyal to King George III. This was a problem for the British, as the southern colonies in North America supplied food, clothing, and other supplies to their sugar plantations in the Caribbean.

“We always look at the American Revolution from an American perspective, with thirteen colonies from New Hampshire down to Georgia,” says Smith. “When you look at the war from a British perspective, you realize that we’re not talking about thirteen colonies, we’re talking about thirty-three colonies that they had to be concerned with, from Nova Scotia down to Grenada. Half of those colonies, sixteen of them, were in the Caribbean.”

During the American Revolution, approximately sixty percent of the British military was stationed in the Caribbean, to protect sugar production. In the eighteenth century, sugar was as important to the global economy as oil is today.

The Floridas were located right between the British sugar plantations in the Caribbean, and the northern colonial revolt. The British launched attacks on the American rebellion from both St. Augustine in East Florida, and Pensacola in West Florida.

St. Augustine was particularly important to the British, as it had the only stone fortresses south of the Chesapeake Bay. The British had repeatedly attacked the Castillo de San Marcos when it was under Spanish control, and realized the strength of its coquina walls.

“They saw East and West Florida as barriers to sedition from rolling out into the Caribbean, and then launching pads for regaining the American south,” Smith says.

Although the importance of Florida in the American Revolution is usually ignored in history books, George Washington was well aware of the area’s strategic significance. Washington wrote more than eighty letters about the Florida colonies to the Continental Congress and his generals, and he authorized five separate invasions of East Florida between 1776 and 1780.

During a series of battles from 1779 to 1781, Spain was able to recapture West Florida from the British. When the American Revolution ended in 1783, England returned East Florida to the Spanish to keep control of Gibraltar.

Florida would become a United States Territory in 1821, and was named a state in 1845. During the Civil War, Florida seceded from the Union, which is probably why its role in the American Revolution has been minimized.

It wasn’t until the 1880s that doctoral degrees in History were available in the United States, and early American historians tended to write from a northern perspective. “They took the opportunity to get their own little bit of vengeance on the south, and they basically wrote the southern colonies out of the first five years of the American Revolution,” Smith says.

Some of the most interesting and controversial architectural ruins in Florida are in New Smyrna Beach.

In 1767, Scottish physician Andrew Turnbull established the colony of New Smyrnea, south of St. Augustine. Today, the town is known as New Smyrna Beach. Turnbull created his settlement during Florida’s British period which lasted twenty years, from 1763 to 1783.

Dot Moore spent more than 30 years working with professional archaeologists and historians, uncovering historic sites and artifacts in New Smyrna.

“Dr. Andrew Turnbull, along with a partner, William Duncan, received large land grants from the British government in 1766,” Moore says. “Turnbull himself was appointed plantation manager of these, and he had all the responsibilities of recruiting people, hiring people, buying slaves, providing whatever resources that were needed to establish the Smyrnea settlement, as it was called by the British.”

Turnbull arranged to bring Greek, Minorcan, and Italian settlers to New Smyrna in 1767. He envisioned a colony that would grow cotton and other crops, to trade with Great Britain. The ships carrying the settlers were plagued with rough weather and sickness, and 148 of the 1,403 people aboard died before the ships reached Florida.

Traditionally, Turnbull is remembered as a harsh and tyrannical administrator, but Moore says that more recent scholarship is providing a more balanced perspective of him.

“Recent documentation found in Dundee, Scotland archives include Turnbull’s letters to Sir William Duncan, his partner, and throw a new light on the care he took with some of his indentured colonists,” says Moore. “Lots of ledger sheets include the equipment and supplies that he bought for these people. He faced many problems here, including political intrigue from the governor in St. Augustine, and the Revolutionary War. There was a lot of sickness and drought, which caused death and failure of crops.”

The Old Fort Ruins are located in downtown New Smyrna Beach. What can be seen today looks like a series of stone walls with no roof. While the site is called the Old Fort Ruins, no one is really sure what this structure was.

“We think based on some documentation in a letter that Turnbull wrote to Sir William Duncan, that it was the beginning of a mansion house for Duncan,” says Moore. “This was on Duncan’s 20,000 acres, Turnbull’s was a little bit north of here.”

While it is generally accepted that the structure was built as part of Turnbull’s Smyrnea settlement, there have been many theories over the years regarding the Old Fort Ruins.

“Some believe it was an English fort, some believe it was a Spanish fort. Some believe that it was not associated with Turnbull, it was maybe built by Ambrose Hull who was the next landowner after Turnbull left in 1777. Ambrose Hull came in 1801, and does record building a large stone house on a mound. This area is part of a prehistoric Indian midden dating to the St. Johns II period, from about 500 AD to 1565 AD. But we’re not 100 percent sure of any theories, even the fact that it could be Turnbull’s manor house.”

The Sugar Mill Ruins are located a few miles from downtown New Smyrna, in another public park. Destroyed in 1835 during the Second Seminole War, the remaining rounded arches and coquina walls of the building have led to some creative, but not historically accurate, speculation.

“That structure was built by a man named William Kimball for wealthy New York investors,” says Moore. “Their hope was to make a fortune, of course, by processing sugar cane into sugar. The factory was built about 1830, but it was destroyed by the end of 1835. It was never rebuilt as a sugar factory.”

Unsupported speculation has linked the two sets of ruins in New Smyrna Beach, with some people believing that the downtown ruins were a Spanish fort, and the Sugar Mill Ruins a Catholic mission.

“There’s even a tale of some people insisting that a tunnel was built underground from this area downtown, all the way out to the sugar mill, which is not quite plausible given the water table here,” says Moore.

Both the Old Fort Ruins and the Sugar Mill Ruins continue to inspire modern imaginations.