By Matthew Cimitile, University Communications and Marketing
The Florida Trust for Historic Preservation has selected La Florida: The Interactive Digital Archives of the Americas as a recipient of a 2024 Florida Preservation Award, praising the project for reshaping scholarship and providing groundbreaking access into the state's early history.
Housed at USF St. Petersburg, La Florida offers a multidisciplinary view of colonial Florida’s rich history. It uses short videos, interactive maps, digital reconstructions and a searchable population database to bring to life the diverse melting pot of people that made up the state’s early history, from Spanish conquistadors and Native Americans to free and enslaved blacks and Europeans from Germany, Ireland and Eastern Europe. The project weaves together the lives and events of more than three centuries of Florida’s colonial past, from Juan Ponce de León’s 1513 expedition to 1821, when Florida became a U.S. territory.
The digital archive received the state preservation award in the category of communications and media.
“When we started this project, we wanted to create a digital portal that would appeal to the broadest community possible,” said J. Michael Francis, the executive director of La Florida and the Hough Family Chair of Florida Studies at USF St. Petersburg. “To receive this recognition from such a prestigious public-facing organization, whose central mission is to promote the ‘inclusive sharing’ of Florida's rich historical, architectural and archaeological heritage tells us that we are on the right track.”
Francis and his team of researchers and students work with paleographers, historians, translators and cultural institutions to comb through thousands of pages of original documents in archives in Spain, Italy, England, Mexico and the United States. They have unearthed an enormous trove of information that adds to the existing body of historical knowledge spanning Florida’s highly formative period from the early 1500s to the start of the 1800s.
The La Florida project allows users to create, engage and interact with the state's early history via a variety of tools and storytelling applications.
Much of this information and supporting historical documentation resides on the La Florida digital archives platform. The platform allows teachers, students, scholars and the general public to research pivotal moments in early Florida history, conduct detailed searches on individuals and demographic changes, and create custom infographics from the entire collection.
“With any long-term project like La Florida, there are always moments of doubt. Everyone on the team has invested so much time and effort, which makes moments like this especially rewarding,” Francis said.
Recently, La Florida launched “Lost Voices from America’s Oldest Parish Archive, 1594-1821,” which makes the St. Augustine diocesan archives digitally accessible for the first time to a global audience. The collection includes baptism, marriage, death and burial records, including the 1801 burial record of Georges Biassou, an early leader of the Haitian Revolution who moved with his family to St. Augustine. Other documents identify the names of dozens of runaway slaves who risked their lives to escape English plantations in search of freedom in Spanish Florida.
“This year’s Preservation Award winners are wonderful examples of the work being done around the state to protect and promote the stories that make up our shared history,” said Florida Trust Board President Mike Cosden. “On behalf of the Florida Trust, we thank these winners for the important work they are doing to protect our state’s extraordinary history – and for inspiring others to do the same in their own communities.”
La Florida also recently received honorable mention for the prestigious Philip M. Hamer and Elizabeth Hamer Kegan Award from the Society of American Archivists.
The project is supported by the Hough Family Foundation, the Lastinger Family Foundation and the Frank E. Duckwall Foundation of Tampa and has received grants from the National Archives.