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 remarkable, lesser-known historic episodes include the Matanzas Massacre, the Land Boom and Bust of the 1920s and several major election issues. These incidents not only shaped the state, they also influenced the development and helped structure the identity of the entire nation. Author Randy Jaye leads readers through an exciting journey spanning more than five hundred years of Florida’s history.”
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.
