Matheson History Museum presents “La Florida: Catholics, Conquistadors, and Other American Origin Stories” on Dec. 10

Press release from Matheson History Museum

GAINESVILLE, Fla. – The Matheson History Museum will host author and historian Dr. Kevin Kokomoor on Sunday, December 10. He will discuss his book La Florida: Catholics, Conquistadores, and Other American Origin Stories, followed by a Q&A and book signing.

La Florida explores a Spanish thread to early American history that is unfamiliar or even unknown to most Americans. As this book uncovers, it was Spanish influence, and not English, which drove America’s early history. By focusing on America’s Spanish heritage, this collection of stories complicates and sometimes challenges how Americans view their past, which author Kevin Kokomoor refers to as “the country’s founding mythology.”

Sunday, December 10, at 7 p.m.
Free with registration

In-person registration: https://mathesonmuseum.networkforgood.com/events/64028-la-florida

Zoom registration: https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_-koOVPZSScWeeHhRg-TmMg

Kevin Kokomoor

Kevin Kokomoor is a fourth-generation Floridian who grew up in the Tampa Bay area. He earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in history at the University of South Florida and his Doctorate in Early American History at Florida State University. His first academic position after graduate school was at Coastal Carolina University in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, where he is currently employed.

Kokomoor recently published Of One Mind and of One Government: The Rise and Fall of the Creek Nation in the Early Republic with the University of Nebraska Press. He has also authored several articles in academic journals, including Journal of Southern History, Georgia Historical Quarterly, Florida Historical Quarterly, Journal of Sport History, and Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. He won the Thompson Award for the best article published in Florida Historical Quarterly in 2009 and the E. Merton Coulter Award for the best article published in Georgia Historical Quarterly in 2013. In 2017 he was a Howard H. Peckham Fellow of Revolutionary America at the Clements Library at the University of Michigan. Other sources of support include the American Philosophical Society, the David Library of the American Revolution, Emory University, and the University of Florida.

These events are sponsored in part by Visit Gainesville/Alachua County, FL; The City of Gainesville; and by the Department of State, Division of Cultural Affairs, the Florida Council of the Arts and Culture, and the State of Florida.

  • Do you plan to have this lecture again during daylight hours for those of us who no longer travel after dusk?

  • I argue that “Catholics and Conquistadores” are Spanish-Colonial History, not American at all. Forced conversion to Catholicism has never been an American program.
    I’d suspiciously consider the term pre-American History, but fully reject it as American History because, well, it isn’t American.

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