Carbon and Nitrogen Stable Isotopic Patterns in South Florida Coastal Ecosystems: Modern and Paleoceanographic Perspectives

Long term management plans for restoration of natural flow conditions through the Everglades increase the importance of understanding potential nutrient impacts of increased freshwater delivery on coastal biogeochemistry. The present study sought to increase understanding of the coastal marine system of South Florida under modern conditions and through the anthropogenic changes in the last century, on scales ranging from individual nutrient cycle processes to seasonal patterns in organic material (OM) under varying hydrodynamic regime, to century scale analysis of sedimentary records. In all applications, carbon and nitrogen stable isotopic compositions of OM were examined as natural recorders of change and nutrient cycling in the coastal system. High spatial and temporal variability in stable isotopic compositions were observed on all time scales. During a transient phytoplankton bloom, ä15N values suggested nitrogen fixation as a nutrient source supporting enhanced productivity. Seasonally, particulate organic material (POM) from ten sites along the Florida Reef Tract and in Florida Bay demonstrated variable fluctuations dependent on hydrodynamic setting. Three separate intra-annual patterns were observed, yet statistical differences were observed between groupings of Florida Bay and Atlantic Ocean sites. The POM ä15N values ranged on a quarterly basis by 7‰, while ä13C varied by 22‰. From a sediment history perspective, four cores collected from Florida Bay further demonstrated the spatial and temporal variability of the system in isotopic composition of bulk OM over time. Source inputs of OM varied with location, with terrestrial inputs dominating proximal to Everglades freshwater discharge, seagrasses dominating in open estuary cores, and a marine mixture of phytoplankton and seagrass in a core from the boundary zone between Florida Bay and the Gulf of Mexico. Significant shifts in OM geochemistry were observed coincident with anthropogenic events of the 20th century, including railroad and road construction in the Florida Keys and Everglades, and also the extensive drainage changes in Everglades hydrology. The sediment record also preserved evidence of the major hurricanes of the last century, with excursions in geochemical composition coincident with Category 4-5 storms.

A State of War: Florida from 1939 to 1945

World War II profoundly impacted Florida. The military geography of the State is essential to an understanding the war. The geostrategic concerns of place and space determined that Florida would become a statewide military base. Florida’s attributes of place such as climate and topography determined its use as a military academy hosting over two million soldiers, nearly 15 percent of the GI Army, the largest force theUS ever raised. One-in-eight Floridians went into uniform. Equally,Florida’s space on the planet made it central for both defensive and offensive strategies. The Second World War was a war of movement, and Florida was a major jump off point forUSforce projection world-wide, especially of air power. Florida’s demography facilitated its use as a base camp for the assembly and engagement of this military power. In 1940, less than two percent of the US population lived in Florida, a quiet, barely populated backwater of the United States.[1] But owing to its critical place and space, over the next few years it became a 65,000 square mile training ground, supply dump, and embarkation site vital to the US war effort. Because of its place astride some of the most important sea lanes in the Atlantic World,Florida was the scene of one of the few Western Hemisphere battles of the war. The militarization ofFloridabegan long before Pearl Harbor. The pre-war buildup conformed to theUSstrategy of the war. The strategy of theUS was then (and remains today) one of forward defense: harden the frontier, then take the battle to the enemy, rather than fight them inNorth America. The policy of “Europe First,” focused the main US war effort on the defeat of Hitler’sGermany, evaluated to be the most dangerous enemy. In Florida were established the military forces requiring the longest time to develop, and most needed to defeat the Axis. Those were a naval aviation force for sea-borne hostilities, a heavy bombing force for reducing enemy industrial states, and an aerial logistics train for overseas supply of expeditionary campaigns. The unique Florida coastline made possible the seaborne invasion training demanded for USvictory. The civilian population was employed assembling mass-produced first-generation container ships, while Floridahosted casualties, Prisoners-of-War, and transient personnel moving between the Atlantic and Pacific. By the end of hostilities and the lifting of Unlimited Emergency, officially on December 31, 1946, Floridahad become a transportation nexus. Florida accommodated a return of demobilized soldiers, a migration of displaced persons, and evolved into a modern veterans’ colonia. It was instrumental in fashioning the modern US military, while remaining a center of the active National Defense establishment. Those are the themes of this work. [1] US Census of Florida 1940. Table 4 – Race, By Nativity and Sex, For the State. 14.

Pirates, Exiles, and Empire: English Seamen, Atlantic Expansion, and Jamaican Settlement, 1558-1658

A life of piracy offered marginal men a profession with a degree of autonomy, despite the brand of “outlaw” and the fear of prosecution. At various times throughout history, governments and crowned heads suspended much of their piracy prosecution, licensing men to work as “privateers” for the state, supplementing naval forces. This practice has a long history, but in sixteenth-century England, Elizabeth I (1558-1603) significantly altered this tradition. Recognizing her own weakness in effectively prosecuting these men and the profit they could contribute to the government, Elizabeth began incorporating pirates into the English naval corps in peacetime—not just in war. This practice increased English naval resources, income, and presence in the emerging Atlantic World, but also increased conflict with the powerful Spanish empire. By 1605, making peace with Spain, James VI/I (1603-1625) retracted Elizabeth’s privateering promotion, prompting an emigration of English seamen to the American outposts they had developed in the previous century. Now exiles, no longer beholden to the Crown, seamen reverted back to piracy. The Carolinas and Jamaica served as bases for these rover communities. In 1650, the revolutionary leader Oliver Cromwell (1649-1658) once again recognized the merits of such policies. Determined to demonstrate his authority and solidify his rule, Cromwell offered citizenship and state support to Caribbean exiles in exchange for their aiding of his navy in the taking of Spanish Jamaica. Official chartering of Port Royal, Jamaica served as reward for these men’s efforts and as the culmination of a century-long cycle of piracy legislation, creating one of England’s most lucrative colonies in the middle of a traditionally Spanish Caribbean empire. Through legal and diplomatic records, correspondence, and naval and demographic records from England and Spain, this dissertation explores early modern piracy/privateering policy and its impact on the development of the Atlantic World. European disputes and imperial competition converged in these piracy debates with significant consequences for the definitions of criminality and citizenship and for the development of Atlantic empire.

The modern state and the re-creation of the indigenous other: The case of the authentic Sami in Sweden and the white man's Indian in the United States of America

The present study comparatively examined the socio-political and economic transformation of the indigenous Sámi in Sweden and the Indian American in the United States of America occurring first as a consequence of colonization and later as a product of interaction with the modern territorial and industrial state, from approximately 1500 to 1900. ^ The first colonial encounters of the Europeans with these autochthonous populations ultimately created an imagery of the exotic Other and of the noble savage. Despite these disparaging representations, the cross-cultural settings in which these interactions took place also produced the hybrid communities and syncretic life that allowed levels of cultural accommodation, autonomous space, and indigenous agency to emerge. By the nineteenth century, however, the modern territorial and industrial state rearranges the dynamics and reaches of power across a redefined territorial sovereign space, consequently, remapping belongingness and identity. In this context, the status of indigenous peoples, as in the case of Sámi and of Indian Americans, began to change at par with industrialization and with modernity. At this point in time, indigenous populations became a hindrance to be dealt with the legal re-codification of Indigenousness into a vacuumed limbo of disenfranchisement. It is, thus, the modern territorial and industrial state that re-creates the exotic into an indigenous Other. ^ The present research showed how the initial interaction between indigenous and Europeans changed with the emergence of the modern state, demonstrating that the nineteenth century, with its fundamental impulses of industrialism and modernity, not only excluded and marginalized indigenous populations because they were considered unfit to join modern society, it also re-conceptualized indigenous identity into a constructed authenticity.^