Black college football began during the nadir of African American life after the Civil War. The first game occurred in 1892, a little less than four years before the Supreme Court ruled segregation legal in Plessy v. Ferguson. In spite of Jim Crow segregation, Black colleges produced some of the best football programs in the country. They mentored young men who became teachers, preachers, lawyers, and doctors--not to mention many other professions--and transformed Black communities. But when higher education was integrated, the programs faced existential challenges as predominately white institutions steadily set about recruiting their student athletes and hiring their coaches. Blood, Sweat, and Tears explores the legacy of Black college football, with Florida A&M's Jake Gaither as its central character, one of the most successful coaches in its history. A paradoxical figure, Gaither led one of the most respected Black college football programs, yet many questioned his loyalties during the height of the civil rights movement. Among the first broad-based histories of Black college athletics, Derrick E. White's sweeping story complicates the heroic narrative of integration and grapples with the complexities and contradictions of one of the most important sources of Black pride in the twentieth century.

Author Curtis Inabinett, Jr., dedicated himself for a seven-year period and delivers the undeniable story of the Legendary Florida A & M University Marching Band. Inabinett's extraordinary biographical display of words, vividly paints an illustrative mind's eye view of the famous band from 1946 to 2015, leaving no stones unturned in his quest to deliver the truth. Released on November 10, 2016, this 296-page 8 by 10 full color book is filled with facts that will instill in readers why 'The Hundred' has survived as one of the top marching bands in America. Inabinett tells the story of Dr. William P. Foster, the band's creator, and how he overcame racism while an undergraduate music major student at the University of Kansas in the early 1940's. This heartfelt message reveals the power of god and perseverance, and is a must read for all lovers of marching bands, but not only that, Inabinett explores the down side of hazing in marching bands, and how 'The Hundred' came back to prominence after a self-imposed suspension in 2012 for a hazing death within its famed band. Inabinett, who has never formally studied journalism, was awarded the first annual '2015 - 2016 Alyce Hunley Whayne Award' for his book manuscript of 'The Hundred, ' and spent one week in December of 2015 at the University of Kansas' Kenneth Spencer Research Library completing research for this book.

Offers a comprehensive look at the history of the state of Florida, from its discovery, exploration, and settlement through its becoming a state, to notable events in the early twenty-first century.

Florida is a story of astonishing growth, a state swelling from 500,000 residents at the outset of the 20th century to some 16 million at the end. As recently as mid-century, on the eve of Pearl Harbor, Florida was the smallest state in the South. At the dawn of the millennium, it is the fourth largest in the country, a megastate that was among those introducing new words into the American vernacular: space coast, climate control, growth management, retirement community, theme park, edge cities, shopping mall, boomburbs, beach renourishment, Interstate, and Internet. Land of Sunshine, State of Dreams attempts to understand the firestorm of change that erupted into modern Florida by examining the great social, cultural, and economic forces driving its transformation. Gary Mormino ranges far and wide across the landscape and boundaries of a place that is at once America's southernmost state and the northernmost outpost of the Caribbean. From the capital, Tallahassee--a day's walk from the Georgia border--to Miami--a city distant but tantalizingly close to Cuba and Haiti--Mormino traces the themes of Florida's transformation: the echoes of old Dixie and a vanishing Florida; land booms and tourist empires; revolutions in agriculture, technology, and demographics; the seductions of the beach and the dynamics of a graying population; and the enduring but changing meanings of a dreamstate. Beneath the iconography of popular culture is revealed a complex and complicated social framework that reflects a dizzying passage from New Spain to Old South, New South to Sunbelt.