Colonial archaeology, cracker culture and country rock, all Florida.
Florida Frontiers is the Florida Historical Society's radio magazine, and each numbered program packs in several separate Florida stories, from 1970 photographs of George Harrison to the failed Spanish settlements of the 1500s. Interviews with scholars, authors and museum staff sit beside narrated reports that quote historians word for word.
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Florida Frontiers is the radio magazine of the Florida Historical Society, and it works like one. Each numbered program starts with Ben Broatmarkle running through what is coming up. It then moves across several Florida stories that often have little to do with one another. That range is the draw. Across a handful of programs, one puts St. Augustine Poet Laureate Anne Browning Masters next to research on Florida's ERA fight, and another goes from an exhibition of 1970 photographs of George Harrison to contact-era archaeology. The archaeology is handled with care. That segment covers a mass burial of 77 people, the scholarly disagreement over how far European disease drove Native population loss, and failed settlement attempts by Ponce de Leon in 1521 and Tristan de Luna in 1559. Historians are quoted directly, with the quotation marks read aloud. Women's history keeps coming up. The ERA segment traces Florida's failed ratification votes in 1972, 1974 and 1977 and notes that the legislature ratified the 19th Amendment only symbolically, in 1969. It also follows research by Voss arguing that press coverage framed the battles between women as catfights and missed the bigger story. A conversation with Connie Lester, editor of the Florida Historical Quarterly, turns to an article by Deborah Bower on British women in the colonization of East and West Florida between 1763 and 1783. Rural heritage gets its own feature. On cracker culture, the program hears from Dana St. Clair and Kara Hoblick about Spanish-bloodline cracker horses, families rooted in the area for generations, and the sprawl pressing into old cracker country around Ocala. Music history appears as well. It comes through a Florida youth club circuit that, by one guest's account, Tom Petty and members of Lynyrd Skynyrd also toured, and a venue restored as a historic listening room. The Florida Historical Society Press has reissued Ellen Call Long's 1883 novel Florida Breezes with a new introduction by Tracy J. Revels, and the program covering it also takes in the Negro Fort at Prospect Bluff and Orlando tourism before Disney. The narration is measured and precise about dates, names and sources. Underwriting credits bookend the programs, and Society announcements, such as registration for its Public History Forum, turn up too. George Harrison and a contact-era burial site can share one program. This is not a single narrative history of Florida. It works more like a sampler that keeps pointing outward, to museums, archives, presses and heritage sites across the state.
Made for: Suits a listener who wants Florida history in varied pieces, from colonial archaeology and women's history to rural heritage and music, and who likes hearing historians and museum staff cited by name.
What sets it apart: Instead of following one narrative, it puts pop-culture footnotes like 1970 photographs of George Harrison next to scholarly segments, such as a conversation with the editor of the Florida Historical Quarterly. The whole thing is tied to a state historical society and its press.
Florida Frontiers: The Weekly Radio Magazine of the Florida Historical Society is a weekly, half-hour radio program airing on public radio stations throughout the state of Florida beginning in January 2009. The program is a combination of interview segments and produced features covering history-based events, exhibitions, activities, places and people in Florida. We explore the relevance of Florida history to contemporary society and promote awareness of heritage and culture tourism options in the state.
Florida's cracker horses and colonial power shifts give your beach-state shorthand a hard time.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
Graham Parsons's Winterhaven roots meet Florida's shifting Spanish and British rule in a brisk, place-minded history hour.
Florida Frontiers draws a clear line between Florida's musical memory and its borderland politics. Bob Keeling's account of Graham Parsons roots the musician's country-rock legacy in Winterhaven, where Dairy Down, once an historic concert venue he played as a teenager, now…
A wide-ranging Florida history episode finds living heritage in cracker culture and the places working to preserve it.
Florida Frontiers looks at Florida cracker culture as history still being carried in families, landscapes, and local memory. The episode traces the term through cattle country, Spanish-bloodline horses, family heritage, and the steady pressure of urban sprawl. Dana St.
A Florida history episode links vernacular poetry to the language surrounding the state's ERA battles.
Florida Frontiers Radio Program #625 moves from St. Augustine Poet Laureate Anne Browning Masters's feeling for local speech into Florida's long, uneasy history with women's rights amendments.
A concise Florida history segment that restores women's authority and work to the colonial record.
Florida Frontiers brings women's authority and labor into the foreground of Florida's colonial history. It opens with the Tumuqua-speaking Mokama of northeast Florida, presenting communities described around households largely run by women and leadership that could rest with…
A wide-ranging Florida history episode links George Harrison's Deerfield Beach photographs with the material evidence of La Florida archaeology.
Florida Frontiers Radio Program #623 brings together a personal glimpse of Florida's past and a harder archaeological record from 16th-century La Florida.
Black Hills history, told on location.
Vegas history with a barstool pulse.
Connecticut history with national echoes.
Texas history, sourced and road-tested.
Maine history, widened through public talks.
Florida Frontiers centers on Graham Parsons, the Winter Haven-born musician who blended country and rock, influenced the Byrds, the Rolling Stones, and the Eagles, and is being inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in the Musical Influence category.
Florida Frontiers Radio Program #626 opens with Florida cracker culture, tracing the term from Shakespeare's King John to British and Spanish documents that used it for rogue white settlers.
Florida Frontiers Radio Program #625 moves from St.
Florida Frontiers Radio Program #624 moves from the Mocama of northeast Florida to British women in colonial Florida and then to Florida’s many constitutions.
Florida Frontiers Radio Program #623 opens with George Harrison’s 1970 Deerfield Beach visit, a family trip documented by 18 photographs in the exhibit George Was Here at the Deerfield Beach Historical Society.
Gabriel Pricer, Stella Sung and librettist Mark Campbell describe adapting Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings's children's book The Secret River into an opera, with performances March 6 and 7 at Mead Botanical Garden in Winter Park.
Tim Gilmore describes Jacksonville activist Eartha White, adopted daughter of Clara White, who founded the Clara White Mission in 1904 and went door to door registering Black women to vote after the 1920 passage of the 19th Amendment.
Dr.
This episode discusses the republished novel Florida Breezes, the Negro Fort at Prospect Bluff, and Orlando tourism before Disney.
A weekly radio magazine exploring Florida history through interviews and features on topics like a classic novel, the Negro Fort, and pre-Disney Orlando tourism.
This episode discusses the republished novel Florida Breezes, the Negro Fort at Prospect Bluff, and Orlando tourism before Disney.
This episode discusses the republished novel Florida Breezes, the Negro Fort at Prospect Bluff, and Orlando tourism before Disney.
A weekly radio magazine exploring Florida history through interviews and features, covering topics like a classic novel, the Negro Fort, and pre-Disney Orlando tourism.