Florida

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Florida juts into the Atlantic world like no other piece of the United States. It is the only state that shares a border with both the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean, and its coastline stretches roughly 1,350 miles through the contiguous states, the longest of any. About two-thirds of it sits on a peninsula, suspended between two great bodies of water, pointing south toward The Bahamas and Cuba. That geography is not incidental. It is the reason Native Americans arrived here at least 14,000 years ago. It is the reason Juan Ponce de León sailed here in 1513 and gave the land a name. It is the reason European empires fought over it for three centuries, why escaped enslaved people ran toward it for sanctuary, why Confederate generals tried to hold it, and why more than 23 million people call it home today. Florida has the fourth-largest economy of any U.S. state, a coral reef that is the only one of its kind in the continental country, and a hurricane exposure rate that has delivered 114 storms between 1851 and 2006 alone. How a swampy peninsula at the edge of a continent became all of this is a story driven as much by war and displacement as by sunshine.

• 2. A Land Before States

  ›

  Paleo-Indians reached Florida at least 14,000 years ago. By the 16th century, when Europeans began keeping written records, a mosaic of distinct peoples occupied every corner of the peninsula. The Apalachee held the Panhandle. The Timucua spread across the north and center. The Ais claimed the central Atlantic coast. The Mayaimi lived around Lake Okeechobee. The Tequesta occupied the southeast, and the Calusa commanded the southwest. During the 1520s, an estimated 700,000 Native Americans were living in Florida. By 1700, that number had collapsed to around 2,000 people. European contact brought Christianity, cattle, horses, sheep, and the Spanish language, and it brought catastrophic disease and violence. Hernando de Soto, skirting the coast in May 1539, described a thick wall of red mangroves stretching mile after mile, some reaching 70 feet, with intertwined elevated roots that made landing difficult. What de Soto saw was also a barrier that the Indigenous peoples had lived alongside for millennia. The Seminole, a later-arriving people, and the Black Seminoles who joined them, would become the last sustained Indigenous resistance on the Florida peninsula, eventually taking refuge in the Everglades after three separate wars, a handful of whom never surrendered to the United States at all.

• 3. Empires on the Peninsula

  ›

  Juan Ponce de León sighted the Florida peninsula on the 2nd of April, 1513, and came ashore the next day. Whether he named it La Florida for its abundant plant life or for La Pascua Florida, the Spanish name for the Easter season in which the expedition likely arrived, remains debated. The story that he was searching for the Fountain of Youth, however, is apocryphal, a legend that arose well after his death. Spain incorporated Florida into its empire in the early 16th century and in 1565 founded St. Augustine under admiral and governor Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, creating the oldest continuously inhabited European-established settlement in what is now the United States. That same year in St. Augustine, a marriage between Luisa de Abrego, a free Black domestic servant from Seville, and Miguel Rodríguez, a white Segovian, became the first recorded Christian marriage in the continental United States. Spain built the Castillo de San Marcos in 1672 and Fort Matanzas in 1742 to defend the capital from English colonists and buccaneers who attacked repeatedly through the 17th and 18th centuries. In 1738, governor Manuel de Montiano established Fort Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose near St. Augustine, the first legally sanctioned free Black settlement in North America, where escaped enslaved people gained freedom in exchange for militia service. Britain acquired Florida in 1763 by the Treaty of Paris, traded for Havana, Cuba, split it into East and West Florida, and introduced common law, trial by jury, and county government. Spain reclaimed both after Britain's defeat in the American Revolutionary War, then ceded the territory permanently to the United States in 1821, after Florida had become, in the words of Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, a derelict open to every enemy of the United States.

• 4. Wars, Removal, and Statehood

  ›

  Florida became the 27th state on the 3rd of March, 1845, just one day before President John Tyler's term ended, admitted as a slave state. The path to that moment had been shaped by the Seminole Wars, which ran from 1816 to 1858 and stand as the longest and most extensive of the American Indian Wars. The Second Seminole War, from 1835 to 1842, was the bloodiest war against Native Americans in United States history. By 1842, most Seminoles and Black Seminoles, facing starvation, had been removed to Indian Territory west of the Mississippi. The Treaty of Payne's Landing in 1832 had promised Seminoles land west of the Mississippi if they agreed to leave; many left, some resisted. Fewer than 200 Seminoles remained in Florida after the Third Seminole War of 1855-1858, hidden in the Everglades, from which they never surrendered. By 1860, Florida had a total population of only 140,424, of whom 44% were enslaved. On the 10th of January, 1861, nearly all delegates in the Florida Legislature approved an ordinance of secession, declaring Florida a sovereign and independent nation. Florida's military contribution to the Confederacy was limited; its 15,000 offered troops were largely sent elsewhere. What Florida did supply was salt and beef, a contribution that became especially critical after 1864, when the Confederacy lost access to Texas beef following the loss of the Mississippi River. The state's congressional representation was restored on the 25th of June, 1868, following the Civil War, a restoration that arrived under compulsion and military occupation.

• 5. Growth, Migration, and Upheaval

  ›

  In 1900, Florida's population was 528,542, and it was the least-populous state in the Southern United States. Nearly 44% of those residents were African American. Roughly 40,000 Black Floridians, about one-fifth of their 1900 population in the state, left during the Great Migration, driven out by lynchings, racial violence, and the absence of opportunity. Disfranchisement of most African Americans persisted until federal legislation in 1965 enforced their constitutional right to vote. In 1956-1957, students at Florida A&M University organized a bus boycott in Tallahassee that succeeded in integrating the city's buses, modeled on the Montgomery boycott. In 1964, an incident at a St. Augustine motel pool, in which the owner poured acid into the water during a demonstration, directly influenced the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Economic prosperity in the 1920s brought a land boom and a rush of hotel and resort development, halted by devastating hurricanes in 1926 and 1928 and then the Great Depression. Florida's economy did not fully recover until the military buildup for World War II. Migration from the Rust Belt and the Northeast sharply increased the population after 1945. In the 1960s, Cuban refugees fleeing Fidel Castro arrived in Miami at the Freedom Tower, which the federal government used to process, document, and provide medical and dental services for the newcomers; the building became known as the Ellis Island of the South. After Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico in September 2017, hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans moved to Florida, with nearly half settling in Orlando. Florida passed New York to become the third-most populous state in December 2014.

• 6. Climate, Weather, and Wild Things

  ›

  Florida carries the nickname the Sunshine State, but its weather history is anything but placid. Central Florida holds the distinction of receiving more lightning strikes than anywhere else in the country. From 1851 to 2006, Florida absorbed 114 hurricanes, 37 of them major, meaning category 3 or above. Of all category 4 or higher storms that have struck the United States, 83% have hit either Florida or Texas. In 1992, Hurricane Andrew struck during August and caused more than $25 billion in damages, making it at the time the costliest weather disaster in U.S. history. The hottest temperature ever recorded in Florida was 109 degrees Fahrenheit, set on the 29th of June, 1931, in Monticello. The coldest was negative 2 degrees Fahrenheit, recorded on the 13th of February, 1899, in Tallahassee, just 25 miles away. Florida's wildlife is equally extreme. In 2012, the state held about one million American alligators and 1,500 crocodiles. The Florida panther is close to extinction; a record 23 were killed in 2009, mainly by automobile collisions, leaving roughly 100 individuals in the wild. The American flamingo, once hunted to the point of being considered completely extirpated, is now reproducing and making a comeback in South Florida. Florida also hosts more than 1,500 nonnative animal species, including the Burmese python, the green iguana, and the rhesus macaque, some of which actively threaten native species. The Florida Reef, the only living coral barrier reef in the continental United States and the third-largest in the world after the Great Barrier Reef and the Belize Barrier Reef, shelters nearly 1,400 species of marine plants and animals, including more than 40 species of stony corals. The first recorded bleaching incident on the Florida Reef was observed in 1973.

• 7. Economy and Political Identity

  ›

  Florida's gross state product reached $1.834 trillion in 2025, making it the fourth-largest economy of any U.S. state and, if it were an independent nation, the fifteenth-largest in the world according to the International Monetary Fund, placing it ahead of Spain. Tourism, hospitality, agriculture, real estate, and transportation drive the economy. Walt Disney World, the Kennedy Space Center, and Miami Beach pull tens of millions of visitors each year. Florida is one of eight states that impose no personal income tax; its primary state revenue source is the sales tax. From 1952 to 1964, most registered voters were Democrats, yet the state supported the Republican presidential candidate in every election except 1964. The closely contested presidential election of 2000 made Florida's weight unmistakable: out of more than 5.8 million votes cast for the two main candidates, roughly 500 votes separated George W. Bush and Al Gore for the Florida electoral votes that decided the presidency. A 2002 study in the American Sociological Review concluded that had the state's 827,000 disenfranchised felons voted at the same rate as other Floridians, Al Gore would have won Florida by more than 80,000 votes. Florida was long considered a bellwether, with every candidate who won the state from 1996 through 2016 winning the election overall; that streak ended in 2020 when Donald Trump won Florida but lost the presidency. In November 2021, for the first time in Florida's history, the total number of registered Republicans exceeded the number of registered Democrats. In 2022, Governor Ron DeSantis won reelection by a margin large enough to prompt many observers to reclassify Florida from a swing state to a reliably Republican one.