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This chapter focuses on the Second Seminole War (1835–1842) and how whites and natives both developed new knowledge about the Seminoles as a unique ethnic group through violence against each other’s dead. On the one hand, Euro-Americans looked to native skulls to add scientific legitimacy to assertions that the Seminoles were a clearly defined ethnicity whose supposed predisposition for violence and lack of ancestral bonds to Florida justified their removal. On the other hand, the collection and circulation of white scalps strengthened the Seminoles’ understanding of themselves as a distinct people and allowed them to rebuild complete communities—ones that integrated the living, the multiethnic dead, and Floridian land—despite the trauma of the war.

This chapter explores the relationship between African Americans and Seminole Indians in the context of the slow ethnogenesis of the Seminoles on the Florida borderlands. In this context, a fluid and historically contingent understanding of the relationship emerges, one where Seminoles and Africans followed converging and coalescing paths. Rather than treating Africans as occupying fixed categories—slaves, free, runaways, intermarried, descendents, or Seminoles—this interpretation recognizes both the temporal component to all these terms and the diversity of experiences within both the Seminole and African communities. Runaways married and had children; independent communities formed social, economic, and political alliances; and emancipation freed many Seminoles. Trade, marriage, sustained communication, and political needs gradually connected the autonomous villages of the Florida interior, while other Africans remained relatively unconnected to their Seminole neighbors.

Andrew K. Frank’s essay on the Florida Everglades documents how the Seminole Indians who have always lived there learned to market their culture and tap into tourists’ desire to experience the exotic frontier of that state. As Frank argues, the growth of Florida’s tourism was spurred by what he calls “pay-per-view performances” by the Seminoles, who, since the 1880s, have consciously marketed stereotypical images that consciously linked them to the “wild frontier” of the Everglades.

The fifth chapter examines white Georgians' drive to extend the state's frontiers and expand plantation slavery in the 1810s. Beginning in the early nineteenth century, the growing demand for cotton brought increasing number of white settlers and slaves to Georgia's southern and southwestern frontiers. The resulting pressure to expand brought white Georgians into conflict with the Creek and Seminole Indians, their British and Spanish allies, and the escaped slaves who found refuge in their midst. With the aid of federal troops, the Tennessee militia, and “friendly” Indians, white Georgians defeated their interracial foes in a series of brutal engagements that ultimately extended Georgia's boundaries and defeated the last remaining impediment to the spread of plantation across the Southeast.

This chapter highlights white, black, and indigenous people’s efforts create new opportunities for political power during the inflation and bursting of Miami’s real estate bubble during the 1920s. It illustrates the links between racial violence and economic growth, and details how white supremacy set the terms for real estate speculation, for conflicts between black Americans and black Caribbean people, and for a series of political transactions that included the surrendering of some 150,000 acres of Seminole Indian land to the real estate interests of the Greater Miami Chamber of Commerce. During the 1920s, this chapter illustrates, South Floridians laid the foundation for Jim Crow’s political culture. And that culture included accepting violence against black people, and “unlawful” black people in particular, as part of acceptable practices of commercial development and good government.

Marty Bowers offers a perspective on the THPO as a citizen of the Seminole Tribe of Florida and a member of the Wind Clan. Born in 1971 and raised on the Big Cypress Seminole Indian Reservation, Bowers rode the bus eighty miles round-trip every day to attend public school in Clewiston, Florida. On the weekends, he joined his father’s Creek-speaking family for services at a Baptist Church on the Brighton Reservation. Raised in a bilingual household, Bowers is today more fluent in the Miccosukee language, the dominant language on the Big Cypress Reservation. Throughout his career, Bowers worked for the Seminole Tribe as a ranch hand, librarian, and museum exhibits specialist. From 2007 to 2010, Bowers served as a cultural advisor to the Tribal Historic Preservation Office. In this wide-ranging and insightful interview, he relates his personal journey of cultural discovery and shares his thoughts and feelings about Seminole history and the work of the Tribal Historic Preservation Office.

This is the first of two chapters to explore the early development and experience of residential segregation in South Florida between the 1890s and early 1920s. It focuses on how city officials, developers, homeowners, and landlords juggled concerns over South Florida’s residential growth with practical efforts to initiate and maintain a workable color line. Over the course of creating the conditions for what local elites considered peaceful economic growth, property rights proved to be a powerful source of political power, as black and white property owners became the principal brokers in negotiating the rules of Jim Crow segregation. The chapter places special emphasis on national and local debates around racial zoning between 1915 and 1922, while also detailing how displays of black and Native American subservience at South Florida’s various tourist attractions proved critical to sustaining the region’s early economy.