Off the beaten path: An insider’s guide to Tampa history for #OHA2015

There are less than two months left before we converge on Tampa for the Oral History Association’s annual meeting! This week, we asked Jessica Taylor of the University of Florida’s Samuel Proctor Oral History Program, who authored “We’re on Fire: Oral History and the Preservation, Commemoration, and Rebirth of Mississippi’s Civil Rights Sites” in the most recent Oral History Review, to give us the inside scoop on some local stories of interest to oral historians. Check it out below, and make sure to book your tickets while they’re still available.

“You, the favored inhabitants of the Sun God’s Golden Land—of the pearl-made beaches, conversing palms, persuasive breezes, of little giggling waves which, surprising you on the seashore seeking amusement, steal up and deposit gifts of tinted shells and pebbles at your feet, then dance away to gather more for you; you for whom the more than stately pleasure domes that far surpass the most extravagant dreams of Kubla Khan in Xanadu have been built—how aware are you of the subterranean force which flows beneath your fabulous mansions?”

—Zora Neale Hurston, “Florida’s Migrant Farm Labor

Unless we all boarded a plane for Sandals™, it’d be hard to plan a conference in an environment more expertly engineered for relaxation than Florida in the winter. A hundred million tourists agree; they’d like to spend their vacation time and cash (around $82 billion in 2014) on the coast, in restaurants with marvelous food. They’d like to drive very, very slowly down shady streets framed by Victorians houses and live oaks and Spanish moss. They’d like to take a long series of pictures in a new and exciting place. They’d like to escape.

Florida historians, including the ones with recorders, insist time and again that escape isn’t possible. Florida is a political and social reflection of both the South and the nation as a whole, and the movement of people and changes in landscapes represent, as Steve Noll writes in Ditch of Dreams, “visions of progress, economic growth, and preservation.” Online news sources might highlight Florida’s bizarre or terrifying daily occurrences, but visitors continue to pour into the Sunshine State in record-breaking numbers even after news of Trayvon Martin’s death, Jeb Bush’s run, manatee insanity, and the struggle for migrant farm worker rights reverberated beyond.

Florida is still unique, though, for the same reason that the field of oral history is special. Florida’s beaches are still beautiful, and its people still diverse, because historians, environmentalists, and working people struggled over the past century to preserve their communities. That’s why you’ll like it so much. Here’s what to look forward to: