Böcker utgivna av University Press of Florida

"They were Uncle Sam's smiling workers and they looked like all-American boys. There were at least 10,000 of them, deployed in 25 Florida camps between 1942 and 1946. They were also members of the Wehrmacht, Hitler's armed forces."--Forum"Most Americans were unaware their government was housing Hitler's soldiers on its shores. . . . Billinger weaves interviews with former prisoners, American soldiers who worked in the camps, newspaper accounts, and government documents into a stunning historical narrative."--Kansas City Star"A tropical paradise that for some became a tropical hell."--Sarasota Herald-Tribune"First came crewmen of destroyed U-boats, then thousands of Afrika Korps veterans who swamped the system in 1943. Pro-Nazi, arrogant, and tough, they defied U.S. authorities, terrorized anti-Nazi inmates, and rioted."--Choice"Filled with colorful personal accounts, this historical book packs the punch of fiction."--St. Petersburg Times"Billinger's first-rate history of this little-known chapter in American history teaches us that, in spite of wartime propaganda, our enemies are human, too."--Atlantic City Press"Hard to put down."--Daytona Beach News-Journal In the first book-length treatment of the German prisoner of war experience in Florida during World War II, Robert D. Billinger, Jr., tells the story of the 10,000 men who were "guests" of Uncle Sam in a tropical paradise that for some became a tropical hell. Having been captured while serving on U-boats off the Carolinas, with the Afrika Korps in Tunisia, with the paratroops in Italy, or with labor battalions in France, the POWs were among the 378,000 Germans held as prisoners in 45 states. Except for the servicemen who guarded them, the civilian pulp-cutters, citrus growers, and sugarcane foremen who worked them, and the FBI and local police who tracked the escapees among them, most people were--and still are--unaware of the German POWs who inhabited the 27 camps that dotted the Sunshine State. Billinger describes the experiences of the Germans and their captors as both sides came to the realization that, while the Germans' worst enemies were often their own comrades-in-arms, wartime enemies might also become life-long friends. Concentrating especially on the story of Camp Blanding in North Florida, Billinger based his research on both American and German archives. His account mixes rare photos with interviews with former prisoners; reports by the International Red Cross, the YMCA, and the U.S. military; and local newspaper articles. This book will be of great value to scholars and historians, as well as all readers with an interest in World War II. Those with an interest in Florida history will also find much to admire in this engaging account of a barely known wartime episode.A volume in The Florida History and Culture Series, edited by Raymond Arsenault and Gary R. Mormino.

Presents an interdisciplinary approach to maritime history in the Mediterranean. This book offers a general overview of facts, including geographical and oceanographic factors that would have affected the navigation of historic ships, major relevant historical texts and documents, and the logistical possibilities of ancient ship design.

Presents the fascinating cultural, economic, and ethnographic history of rum in the Caribbean from the colonial period to the present. Frederick Smith explains why this industry arose in the islands, how attitudes toward alcohol consumption have impacted the people of the region, and how rum production evolved over 400 years.

In this comprehensive study of a lowland South American people's astronomy, the author explains how the Bororo Indians of Brazil integrate the social, natural and cosmic dimensions of time and space into their environment.

First published by NASA in 2000 as ""Challenge to Apollo"", this volume, together with a second volume entitled ""The Soviet Space Race with Apollo"", presents a comprehensive history of the Soviet-manned space programmes covering a period of 30 years.

The American prose poem has a rich history marked by important contributions from major writers. Michel Delville's book is the first full-length work to provide a critical and historical survey of the American prose poem from the early years of the 20th century to the 1990s.

A compilation of interviews with Martha Graham's ""family"" of dancers, teachers, choreographers and actors, which also includes biographical material about her life and influence as the creator of classic modern dance. The book features a syllabus of Graham's work.

As its title suggests, this book is ostensibly Tristram's narration of his life story. But it is one of the central jokes of the novel that he cannot explain anything simply, that he must make explanatory diversions to add context and colour to his tale, to the extent that Tristram's own birth is not even reached until Volume III.

Henry David Thoreau, one of America's most prominent environmental writers, supported himself as a land surveyor for much of his life, parceling land that would be sold off to loggers. In the only study of its kind, Patrick Chura analyzes this seeming contradiction to show how the best surveyor in Concord combined civil engineering with civil disobedience.Placing Thoreau's surveying in historical context, Thoreau the Land Surveyor explains the cultural and ideological implications of surveying work in the mid-nineteenth century. Chura explains the ways that Thoreau's environmentalist disposition and philosophical convictions asserted themselves even as he reduced the land to measurable terms and acted as an agent for bringing it under proprietary control. He also describes in detail Thoreau's 1846 survey of Walden Pond. By identifying the origins of Walden in--of all places--surveying data, Chura re-creates a previously lost supporting manuscript of this American classic.