Tampa Bay: The Story of an Estuary and Its People with Evan P. Bennett

The largest open water estuary in Florida, Tampa Bay has been a flashpoint of environmental struggles and action in recent years.

InTampa Bay, Evan Bennett reveals that humans have been part of the bay’s ecology since the estuary took its modern form 2,000 years ago, along with the communities of fish, birds, reptiles, and mammals
that proliferated in its seagrass meadows, tidal salt flats, and mangrove forests.
Bennett discusses the natural resources that drew people to settle there, the trade that encouraged development, and the shipping and industry that increased biological and ecological change.
Tombolo Books is thrilled to welcome Evan P. Bennett and Gary Mormino to discuss how Bennett's latest ecological history deep-dive uncovers deep-rooted relationships between water, land, and people and offers hope for bringing threatened coastal spaces back from the brink.

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Evan P. Bennett is an associate professor of history at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton. Born and raised less than a mile from Tampa Bay, Bennett graduated with bachelor’s and master’s degrees in history from the University of South Florida before finishing a Ph.D. at the College of William & Mary. He is a historian of the American South who most interested in how people have worked in nature, whether it’s behind a mule, on a wharf, or in a boat. His first book was When Tobacco Was King: Families, Farm Labor, and Federal Policy in the Piedmont (University Press of Florida, 2014). He is also co-editor of Beyond Forty Acres and a Mule: African American Landowning Families since Reconstruction (University Press of Florida, 2012). He is currently directing the Voting Rights History Civic Literacy Project, a Mellon Foundation-funded project to develop online resources to teach the history of voting in colleges and secondary schools. He is also working on a book about Marion Post-Wolcott’s 1939 journey to photograph the South.
Gary R. Mormino is the Frank E. Duckwall Professor of History Emeritus at the University of South Florida St. Petersburg. He is the winner of the Florida Humanities 2015 Florida Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing and serves as Florida Humanities scholar in residence. His many books include Land of Sunshine, State of Dreams: A Social History of Modern Florida.

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