Becoming Florida Brechner Series
Sunday, July 11, 2021
In the finale of this year’s Becoming Florida Brechner Series, scholars James G. Cusick, Ph.D., and Sherry Johnson, Ph.D., examine Andrew Jackson’s influence on Florida as our first American governor. They’ll also look at the early days of territorial Florida through the eyes of various observers and consider the longer-term effects of the 1821 change of flags from Spain to the United States. The speakers will draw in part from their 2016 book, Andrew Jackson in Florida, published by the Florida Historical Society Press.
James Cusick, Ph.D.
James Cusick is the curator for the P.K. Yonge Library of Florida History at the University of Florida. He writes primarily about life in Florida during the late colonial period and is the author of The Other War of 1812: The Patriot War and the American Invasion of Spanish East Florida (University of Georgia Press, 2006) and co-editor, with Sherry Johnson, of The Voyages of Ponce de León: Scholarly Perspectives (Florida Historical Society Press, 2012) and Andrew Jackson in Florida (Florida Historical Society Press, 2016). He has served on the Board of Directors for the Florida Historical Society, the St. Augustine Historical Society, and the Seminole Wars Foundation, Inc., and was one of the scholars featured in the PBS television program Secrets of Spanish Florida. He is currently researching crime investigation in colonial Florida.
Sherry Johnson, Ph.D.
Sherry Johnson retired as professor of History at Florida International University in Miami in December 2019. In 1995, she earned a Ph.D. in Latin American history from the University of Florida. Her first book, The Social Transformation of Eighteenth‑Century Cuba, was published by the University Press of Florida in 2001, and her 2011 study, Climate and Catastrophe in Cuba and the Atlantic World in the Age of Revolution (University of North Carolina Press) was the winner of the 2012 Gordon K. and Sybil Lewis Prize for best book on Caribbean Studies. She is co-editor, with James G. Cusick, of Andrew Jackson in Florida (2016) and The Voyages of Ponce de León: Scholarly Perspectives, 1513-2013 (2012), both published by Florida Historical Society Press. In January 2020, Johnson was named Outstanding Woman in Florida History by the Florida Historical Society.
Image: THE AMERICANS AT BARRANCAS
General Andrew Jackson’s army approaches Spanish Ft.Barrancas in Pensacola, 1818, by Jackson Walker
