Florida: Frontier and Cracker History

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Before the land boom and amusement parks, Florida was still seen as part of the US's frontier. In this episode, Elizabeth explores the state's history of white settlement and the term "Cracker". 

​Podcaster: Elizabeth

Further Reading

Osceola History’s Pioneer Village at Shingle Creek.

Monica Berra, "Conservative Rebels: Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings and Cracker Culture." Journal of Florida Studies 1:3 (2014). 

James M. Denham, "The Florida Cracker before the Civil War as Seen through Travelers' Accounts." The Florida Historical Quarterly 72: 4 (1994): 453-468.

Nancy Isenberg, White trash: The 400-year Untold History of Class in America (Penguin, 2017).

Grady McWhiney, Cracker Culture: Celtic Ways in the Old South, (University of Alabama Press, 1989).

David J. Nelson, How the New Deal Built Florida Tourism: The Civilian Conservation Corps and State Parks (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2019).

John Solomon Otto, "Cracker: the History of a Southeastern Ethnic, Economic, and Racial Epithet." Names 35: 1 (1987): 28-39.

Dana Ste. Claire, Cracker: the Cracker culture in Florida history (University Press of Florida, 2006).

Works to read that address Owsley’s conclusions and place in the scholarship. These works are, for the most part, in chronological order.:

Frank Lawrence Owsley, Plain folk of the Old South (LSU Press, 1949, reprint 2008).

Fabian Linden, "Economic Democracy in the Slave South: An Appraisal of Some Recent Views," The Journal of Negro History 31: 2 (1946): 140-189.

Lacy K. Ford, "Yeoman Farmers in the South Carolina Upcountry: Changing Production Patterns in the Late Antebellum Era," Agricultural History60: 4 (1986): 17-37. Accessed April 10, 2021. 

Charles C. Bolton, Poor Whites of the Antebellum South: Tenants and Laborers in Central North Carolina and Northeast Mississippi (Duke University Press, 1994).

Timothy James Lockley, Lines in the Sand: Race and Class in Lowcountry Georgia, 1750-1860 (University of Georgia Press, 2001).

Jeff Forret, "Slaves, Poor Whites, and the Underground Economy of the Rural Carolinas," The Journal of Southern History 70: 4 (2004): 783-824. 

Victoria E. Bynum, The Long Shadow of the Civil War: Southern Dissent and Its Legacies (Univ of North Carolina Press, 2010).

Keri Leigh Merritt, Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South (Cambridge University Press, 2017).

​Music: "Evening Melodrama" by Kevin Macleod (www.incompetech.com)