Ponce De Leon–lauded for his “discovery” of Florida at a time when it was populated by complex societies with vast social, political, and economic networks–took an arrow though his armor a few days into his […]
Category: History
Great Florida Trees and When to See Them
Florida’s got trees, y’all. Big ones, small ones, and even some of the largest and oldest of their species worldwide. (Well, there’s one less of these since some meth addicts tried to start a fire […]
FloWriter’s Best Stories of 2019
The end of the decade is upon us. The fledgling FloWriter was only around for the last two-ish years of this decade, but it’s come a long way. We covered a lot of ground and […]
Sovereign State of Mind: How “America’s Escape” Escaped from America
The Conch Republic is an archipelagic state situated in the Florida Straits, dividing the Gulf of Mexico to the west from the Atlantic Ocean to the east. Its nearest neighbor is the United States, sharing […]
Adelantado Iconography in Mérida, Yucatán
I recently traveled to Mérida, Yucatán to vacation with some of the best people in my life. To spare you all the mushy friends-on-vacation-in-an-incredibly-beautiful-place-with-amazing-food-and-sights talk, I’ll get straight to the part about a Spanish conquistador […]
The Remarkable Career of the Fastest Woman on Earth
I posted this LOOK Magazine cover and a short blurb on Twitter back in 2017 B.F. (Before FloWriter). But I knew immediately that the short-form post just did not do justice to the amazing career […]
Bob Roth’s New River Grove
The Big Orange along Griffin Road in Davie has been a staple since the mid 1960s. Al Roth moved from Philadelphia to South Florida with the dream of owning an orange grove. Later, his sons […]
February 5, 1995: Happy Birthday Trayvon Martin
Happy birthday to Trayvon Martin. On February 26, 2012, George Zimmerman shot and killed Martin—an unarmed black child—and was eventually acquitted of murder on self-defense, with the staunch support of the NRA. Trayvon was walking […]
January 28, 1986: The Challenger Disaster
Today marks the 33rd anniversary of the Challenger Disaster. NASA shuttle orbiter mission STS-51-L marked the tenth flight of Space Shuttle Challenger (OV-99). The shuttle carried five NASA astronauts and two payload specialists, including Francis […]
Ted Bundy Put to Death, Jan 24, 1989
On this day in 1989, Ted Bundy was executed in Florida State Prison after admitting to at least 20 murders in the Pacific Northwest and Florida. Robert Keppel, a state investigator that tracked Bundy for […]
On the Cultural Track of the Skunk Ape
The Skunk Ape—or swampsquatch, abominable Florida apeman, abominable swamp slob, Florida Bigfoot, myakka skunk ape, swamp monkey, Holopaw gorilla, Squattam’s growler, stink ape, Sandman, swamp cabbage man, boggy bugger, or Bardin booger—is Florida’s own foul-smelling, […]
Happy Birthday to the Queen of the Harlem Renaissance
Zora Neale Hurston, famed Florida anthropologist and writer, was born January 7, 1891. Among her incredible body of work is a collection of African American songs, stories, histories, and traditions that she gathered from minority […]
Flight One: The First Scheduled Airline Service in the World
The railroads of Henries Plant and Flager. The Shuttles of Florida’s Space Coast. The Monorails of Disney (the most heavily used monorail system in the world, thank you very much). Florida’s contributions to innovative methods […]
The Wakulla Volcano, Part 3: A Florida Mystery “Solved”
In Part 1 of this series, we learned that traces of a volcano had been visible for at least a few decades, and perhaps much longer, and the this strange phenomenon was halted by an […]
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