Florida History
Research / Financial support / Faculty
The History Department welcomes M.A. and Ph.D. students
interested in focused or related study in Florida history. In turn, the intellectual
and monetary resources available at the University of Florida make the state’s
flagship educational institution an attractive setting for such individuals.
Heir to the department’s long tradition in cultivating talented scholars,
our current students present papers at state, regional, and national conferences,
and they publish their work in scholarly journals and edited books. The graduate
program’s alumni have produced award-winning books, teach at respectable
colleges and universities, and serve on the boards of professional associations.
The History Department is housed in the recently renovated Keene-Flint Hall,
one the earliest and most attractive buildings on campus. It is steps away
from the arts and sciences library, and on its grounds stands the oldest existing
longleaf pine tree in north Florida.
Gainesville is strategically located for conducting research in Florida history. The university is two hours by car from the state archives and the Claude Pepper library in Tallahassee, two hours from the Florida Studies Center and its archives at the University of South Florida, Tampa (where many of our students have received research stipends), and less than two hours from repositories of colonial records at St. Augustine and the University of North Florida in Jacksonville.
Our own holdings at the P. K. Yonge Library of Florida History are unsurpassed in the state and maintained by a knowledgeable and supportive staff. The holdings include one of the most extensive collections of Spanish and British colonial records; eighteenth- and nineteenth-century newspapers; Florida Indian and Seminole war manuscripts and records; an African American history collection with governmental and personal records from the antebellum period to the present; and the papers of Florida politicians, writers, women, scholars, and social and environmental activists.
Archival research in Florida history has many complements at the University of Florida. The extensive primary- and secondary-source holdings of the Marston Science Library facilitate research in the P. K. Yonge’s expanding environmental history collections. With a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Digital Library Center is now engaged in digitizing Florida’s major historic newspapers, and it has made the Sanborn Fire Insurance maps of several Florida cities, dating back to 1884, available on-line. The Samuel Proctor Oral History Program, founded by its namesake, represents one of the largest oral-history collections in the country. An active program, it gathers oral memories representing all socioeconomic groups in Florida. Full-text versions will in the near future be accessible on-line.
Virtually all the department’s Ph.D. students are funded in some way. The university, college, and department make available numerous fellowships and teaching and research assistantships, as do the Oral History Program and Special and Area Studies Collections. After being admitted to candidacy, many Ph.D. students earn stipends by conducting their own courses as teaching associates.
The expertise of our faculty can accommodate most research interests in Florida. Skilled teachers and active scholars, the faculty have earned national reputations for their publications, professional association involvement, media activity, and awards. Those working with students in Florida history include the following:
Sean Adams
Professor Adams specializes in nineteenth-century American political
economy, with a particular emphasis upon energy production and
consumption. Although his publications deal mostly with the coal trade,
he is also in the early stages of a project on the nineteenth-century
economic development of Florida.
Jeffrey Adler
Professor Adler specializes in U.S. urban history and the history of crime.
His most recent work combines these themes, focusing on the history of murder
in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American cities.
Juliana Barr
Professor Barr is a historian of early America, with research and teaching
fields focusing on women, the Spanish Borderlands, and relations among Native
Americans and Europeans.
David Colburn
Professor Colburn is a historian of modern America whose publications focus
on politics, race relations, ethnicity, and Florida. He has graduate students
working on topics of civil rights, race relations, and politics in modern
Florida.
Jack E. Davis
Professor Davis is a historian of the modern South and the American environment
whose publications focus on race relations and civil rights, environmentalism,
and Florida. The research interests of his students working on Florida include
the environment, ethnicity, sport, and women.
Steven Noll
Professor Noll is primarily a historian of disability, emphasizing
the American South. He also works on twentieth-century Florida, emphasizing
the intersection of race, politics, and the environment.
Julian Pleasants
Professor Pleasants is director of the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program
and he has written two books on Florida.
Jon Sensbach
Professor Sensbach is a historian of early America whose research has focused
on slavery, black Atlantic cultures, and religion. He is at work on a new
book about the religious transformation of the early South which will explore
connections between British colonies, Spanish Florida, French
Louisiana, and the Caribbean.
Joseph Spillane
Professor Spillane is a historian of modern American social policy, public
health, drugs, and criminal justice. The research interests of his students
working on Florida topics include capital punishment, drug policing, and the
juvenile justice system.
