Flagler Beach author and historian Randy Jaye released his fifth book on March 18: Florida Flashpoints: Extraordinary Moments From Spanish Colony to the Space Age.
“I wanted to highlight Florida’s long, interesting and sometimes turbulent history with what I consider to be 36 of the state’s most important historic moments,” Jaye said of what prompted him to write his latest book. Some of those historic moments are nearly unknown to a large number of people, including Florida natives, he said.
Arcadia Publishing (The History Press), publisher of Jaye’s Florida Flashpoints, summarizes some of those events in its blurb for the book: “Huge Moments in Florida History–When Spanish conquistador Juan Ponce de León landed in Florida in 1513, the world was changed forever. Florida has been an influential center for many important historic events, including clashes of European empires, Indian wars, civil rights struggles and the Cold War-era space race to the moon.
Other historical events include early Spanish and French explorations, the founding of Pensacola and St. Augustine (the nation’s oldest uninterruptedly inhabited city), the decimation of Florida’s original indigenous people, Fort Mose, intricate connections to slavery, the British period, the rise of the plantations, the American Revolutionary War, the New Smyrna Colony, the Three Seminole Wars, Black Seminoles, secession and the American Civil War, Florida’s Confederate “Cow Calvary,” Jim Crow-era struggles, Henry Flager, and so on, all the way to Walt Disney World, Hurricane Andrew and the 2000 presidential election.
This book is chronologically structured to guide readers on a journey through the very roots and evolution of Florida as it examines many of its most interesting, important and consequential historic episodes.
Jaye’s previous four books are: Flagler County, Florida: A Centennial History (2017); Perseverance: Episodes of Black History from the Rural South (2020); Jim Crow Era Propaganda, Artifacts and Upheavals in Florida (2022) and Florida Prohibition: Corruption, Defiance and Tragedy (2024).
Florida Flashpoints: Extraordinary Moments From Spanish Colony to the Space Age is available through online orders from Amazon, Barnes & Nobel, Target and several other distributors. The book is also physically available on the bookshelves of several retailers.
Laurel says
Florida, my home state, has so much more to it than people realize. I hate it when people write “Floriduh.” This state has fossils, springs, red waters, blue waters, black waters, gold sand, red sand, and pink sand. It has beautiful palms with coconuts I hacked into as a kid. It has oaks, and cedars, and gators, and bats. It has birds of many feathers. It used to have mammoths. Just thinking of all its beauty is overwhelming, and saddens me deeply to see it mowed down for condos and housing for people who call it “Floriduh.” I realize how little of Florida they know, and how little they care.
Laurel says
It also has caverns with stalactites and stalagmites, and gems, and fish, and nudibranchs, and mollusks and crabs and…
The land of flowers.