This text traces the growth and social development of the Florida frontier through its experience with crime and punishment. Using court records, government documents, newspapers and personal papers, it explores how crime affected ordinary citizens in antebellum Florida.

James M. Denham traces the growth and social development of this sparsely settled region through its experience with crime and punishment. Along the way, he examines such issues as Florida's criminal code, its judicial and law enforcement officers, the accommodation of criminals in jails and courts, outlaw gangs, patterns of punishment, and the attitude of the public toward lawbreakers. He tells much of this story through the lives of those who participated in Florida's criminal justice system at all levels: criminal, constable, sheriff, judge, jury member, and victim.

Brings together the reminiscences of two pioneers who came of age in antebellum Florida's Columbia County and the nearby Suwannee River Valley. Though they held markedly different positions in society, the two shared the adventure, hardship and tragedy that characterized Florida's pioneer era.

Echoes from a Distant Frontier is an edited, annotated selection of the correspondence of Corinna and Ellen Brown, two single women in their twenties, who left a comfortable New England home in 1835 for the Florida frontier. Moving with two aunts and a brother following the deaths of their parents, the Brown sisters settled near the village of Mandarin on the east bank of the St. Johns River, just south of present-day Jacksonville. These two articulate and literate women, both aspiring authors, wrote of their experiences and observations to family members - most important their brother...

Succeeds in lifting the veil to capture the daily drama, excitement, and importance of one federal district court s work all within the framework of the legal and political developments of the time. This fascinating and invaluable narrative history is a must-read for all serious students of Florida s federal judiciary, as well as of the general history of the state. Walter W. Manley II, coeditor of The Supreme Court of Florida and Its Predecessor Courts, 1821 1917
On any day, America s courts are a trove of human interest, significant drama, and the making of public policy....

Each day thousands of revelers trudge down DuVal Street in Florida's Key West, but few know for whom the street is named. In Florida Founder William P. DuVal, James M. Denham provides the first full-length biography of the well-connected, but nearly forgotten frontier politician of antebellum America. The scion of a well-to-do Richmond, Virginia, family, William Pope DuVal (1784-1854) migrated to the Kentucky frontier as a youth in 1800. Settling in Bardstown, DuVal read law, served in Congress, and fought in the War of 1812.
In 1822, largely because of the influence of his lifelong...