Explore Florida   

Albert Whitted Airport, one of the few surviving downtown airports in America, has been a waterfront staple of the Sunshine City for nearly a century. Birthed out of an era of optimism and rapid transformation of the aviation industry, the airport today finds itself at a crossroads between heritage and progress in a city with increasingly limited expansion space. This lecture explores the history of the city’s iconic airport, from its namesake aviator to its uncertain future.

Who knows? What do they know? How do they know what they know? This talk explores who spread and transmitted information in early Florida. Information circulated through the region via spies, scouts, traders, missionaries, and other ad hoc couriers—and by encounters of sheer chance with hunting parties, shipwrecked sailors, captured soldiers, or fugitive slaves. Centering the experiences of Native people and their encounters with people of African and European descent, we explore how networking information was not simply about having the most up-to-date news or the quickest messenger. It was a way of establishing and maintaining relationships, of articulating values and enforcing priorities. The circulation, materiality, and textuality of information was thus a process inextricably tied to the region’s social and geopolitical realities.

While St. Petersburg is famous for being the birthplace of commercial aviation, Albert Whitted Airport also boasted a successful Goodyear blimp base that once played a key role in the city’s promotional efforts. Providing lofty views above the Sunshine City during the Depression years, the blimp was one of the city’s most recognizable figures during the pre-WWII years. From marriages to world records, scandals to celebrities, the blimps wove themselves into the fabric of the region and provided many residents with their first memories of flight. This lecture explores the largely-forgotten history of the airships that once carried the name of St. Petersburg throughout America.

Longtime numismatic expert and Florida native Daniel Frank Sedwick shares his knowledge of the most important Spanish shipwrecks lost and salvaged off Florida's coasts in the 1600s and 1700s, with brief histories of each and examples of treasures recovered from them in our time. Most of the shipwrecks covered are from the storm-tossed Spanish Treasure Fleets of 1622, 1715 and 1733, ranging in location from Key West northward up the east coast to Melbourne, following the path of the Gulf Stream from the Straits of Florida. This presentation will focus primarily on modern salvage, particularly the gold and silver coins, ingots and jewels yielded by these wrecks in our time.