Florida
Florida
Might as well skip the appetizers and start with the main course. Florida's digital archives are housed at Florida Memory.
This is an extensive online collection which describes itself as "...a selection of historical records that illustrate significant moments in Florida history, educational resources for students of all ages and archival collections for historical research..."
There's a lot here, beginning with a sizable Photography Collection of more than 160,000 photos and images. You can search the entire collection, or browse the photos by theme...the pictures are arranged in a series of Photo Exhibits
Alligators
Archaeology
Baseball
Black History
Bob Graham
Bush Years
Cattle Ranching
Cigar Workers
Conch Town
Daguerreotype to Digital
Dale Mabry Field
Everglades
Folklife Postcards
Golf
Harper Collection
Hurricanes
Key West
Kingsley Plantation
Jacksonville Fire
Migrant Workers
Movies
NASA
Pets
Roadside Attractions
Roxcy Bolton
Seminoles
Spanish - American War
Winter Holidays
Women's History
Women Who Serve
Yamato Colony
The Florida Online Classroom collection is a series of Educational Units that include:
- Florida Then & Now
- Black History Month
- Voices of Florida
There is also a Florida Film and Video Clips unit, that includes quite a number of diverse films having to do, in one way or another, with Florida. There's a page of additional films including The Adventures of X-14, about an alien landing in St. Petersburg Beach.
A collection of the Highlights of Florida History provides the archives' images of historically significant documents, by historical period:
- First Spanish Period to Early Statehood
- Civil War Period
- Reconstruction to Progressive Era
- World War I to the Depression
- World War II to the Present
On the page of Collections, Databases, Finding Aids, and Indexes there is a terrific set of resources, as listed below. A lot of the materials are useful for family history research, and I've linked to these:
- Florida Folklife Collection
- Spanish Land Grants
- World War I service cards
- Florida Confederate Pension Application Files
- Florida's Early Constitutions
- Call Family and Brevard Family Papers
- Papers Concerning the Will of Zephaniah Kingsley, 1844, 1846
- Florida broadsides and other ephemera, 1800-2000
- WPA Stories
- Physician's Journal
- A Guide to Florida Governors and the Florida Cabinet
- A Guide to Civil War Records at the State Archives of Florida
- THE BLACK EXPERIENCE: A Guide to African American Resources in the State Library and Archives of Florida
- Collections Pertaining to Women's History and Women's Issues from the State Archives of Florida
- A Guide to New Deal Records at the State Archives of Florida
By the way, there's a separate homepage for the Florida State Archives and a full-fledged archives search tool for their offline holdings.
I also want to mention the University of Florida Digital Collections, which has several Florida-specific collections, including newspapers, law, oral histories, and photographs.
More historical archives and research materials can be found at these excellent resources:
