Event Type: Branch

Takes Place: 19th March 2025

Time: 7pm

Venue: Online via Zoom

Description: When I ask my students if they’ve travelled to the United States, their answers usually mention two states: New York, and Florida. Florida, which is known today for Disneyworld and alarming local news stories about alligators, is a weird place. This talk explores early modern maps of Florida to discuss some of the reasons why it became this way. In the sixteenth century the Spanish had called it La Florida. They drew it as a continent of rivers and a shortcut to the Pacific Ocean. By the 1730s English colonists in Georgia were trying to carve out space for themselves on the Atlantic coast with permission from Yamacraw leaders. The continuing Spanish presence in La Florida is why English maps of the Georgia colony locate St. Augustine so much further to the south than it actually was. By the 1760s, when a European treaty ceded Florida to the British and they split it into two Floridas with Atlantic and Gulf ports, maps of Florida became weirder. East and West Florida maps gained more inland rivers, lakes, swamps, and islands. In reality, Florida was a Creek and Seminole homeland populated by Indigenous people who contested borders on maps with British, then Spanish, and then American officials. Maps were tools of empire that allowed non-Indigenous people to claim land and water, but which also consistently failed to reflect lived realities on the ground. The trickiness of depicting where Florida was, which nations claimed it, and who lived in it helped to make it so very weird.

How to book: Via event link to book Zoom talk

Price: Free

Email: Edbury@cardiff.ac.uk

Organiser: Cardiff Branch HA

Lecturer: Dr Rachel Herrmann Cardiff University

Region: Wales

Branch: Cardiff