Category Archives: American History

Paper 6 — Mutual Aid Without the State: The Immigrant Societies of Ybor City, 1887–1930s

Posted on July 20, 2026 by nathanalbright

Introduction The immigrants who built Ybor City faced the oldest and hardest problems of working-class life: sickness, injury, death, the doctor’s bill no wage could cover, the funeral no family could afford, the widow and orphan left with nothing. In … Continue reading →

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Paper 5 — Making Ybor City: The Cigar Migration and the Birth of an Immigrant Working Class, 1880s–1900

Posted on July 20, 2026 by nathanalbright

Introduction In 1885 Tampa was a small, struggling Southern town of a few thousand people, still recognizably the cracker cowtown of the previous paper. Within fifteen years it had been transformed almost beyond recognition into a booming industrial city, home … Continue reading →

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Paper 4 — A Cracker Cowtown at War: Households, Slavery, and Survival, 1840s–1870s

Posted on July 20, 2026 by nathanalbright

Introduction Between the end of the Second Seminole War and the close of Reconstruction, Tampa grew from a garrison village into a small Southern town—and then was nearly unmade by war. This paper follows that arc from below: not through … Continue reading →

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Paper 3 — Fort Brooke, the Enslaved, and the Seminoles: The American Frontier from Its Margins, 1824–1860s

Posted on July 20, 2026 by nathanalbright

Introduction When the United States built Fort Brooke at the mouth of the Hillsborough River in 1824, it planted the seed of the city that would become Tampa. The standard telling makes this a story of national expansion: a frontier … Continue reading →

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Paper 2 — Invasion and Survival: The Tocobaga World Under Assault, 1528–1600s

Posted on July 20, 2026 by nathanalbright

Introduction The people described in the first paper—the fishers, shellfish gatherers, and mound-builders of Tampa Bay—stood on the edge of a catastrophe they could not have imagined. Within a single lifetime of the first Spanish landing, epidemic disease, slave-raiding, and … Continue reading →

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Synthesis: Four Centuries of a Contested Coast

Posted on July 19, 2026 by nathanalbright

Abstract This concluding paper draws together the arguments of the preceding nine and advances an interpretation of the whole. It proposes that the military history of Tampa Bay passed through three phases—the bay as beachhead, as staging area, and finally … Continue reading →

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MacDill Today: CENTCOM, SOCOM, and Contemporary Force Projection (1983–Present)

Posted on July 19, 2026 by nathanalbright

Abstract This paper examines the contemporary MacDill Air Force Base, arguing that a field built to train bomber crews in the Second World War has become one of the most strategically weighted installations in the United States military. It accounts … Continue reading →

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MacDill in the Cold War: From Strategic Bombers to the Home of Unified Commands (1946–1990)

Posted on July 19, 2026 by nathanalbright

Abstract This paper examines MacDill Air Force Base during the Cold War, arguing that the period gave the base a dual identity that would determine its future. As a flying installation, MacDill moved from being one of the original bases … Continue reading →

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The World Wars and the Birth of MacDill: Aviation, Coastal Defense, and the Making of a Permanent Base (1917–1945)

Posted on July 19, 2026 by nathanalbright

Abstract This paper traces Tampa Bay’s military development across the two World Wars, from the modest aviation and coastal-defense role of the First World War to the founding and wartime expansion of MacDill Field, the installation that would define the … Continue reading →

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Tampa and the Spanish-American War: The Making of a Port of Embarkation (1898)

Posted on July 19, 2026 by nathanalbright

Abstract This paper examines Tampa’s role in the Spanish-American War of 1898, when the small Gulf city became the principal port of embarkation for the United States invasion of Cuba. It argues that Tampa was chosen for concrete infrastructural and … Continue reading →

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