Category Archives: American History

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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Fort Brooke and Tampa in the Civil War: The Blockaded Storehouse (1861–1865)

Posted on July 18, 2026 by nathanalbright

Abstract This paper examines the role of Fort Brooke and the town of Tampa in the American Civil War, arguing that the bay’s importance in these years was economic before it was tactical. Tampa was a small and remote Gulf … Continue reading →

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Fort Brooke and the Seminole Wars: The Making of a Military Town (1824–1858)

Posted on July 18, 2026 by nathanalbright

Abstract This paper traces the founding of Fort Brooke at the mouth of the Hillsborough River in 1824 and its central role across the three decades of conflict known collectively as the Seminole Wars. It argues that Fort Brooke was … Continue reading →

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Pirates, Privateers, and the Contested Gulf: Maritime Predation off Tampa Bay (1700s–1820s)

Posted on July 18, 2026 by nathanalbright

Abstract This paper examines maritime predation in the Gulf waters off Tampa Bay across the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and it does so with a deliberate methodological aim: to separate what the documentary record supports from what later civic … Continue reading →

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The Spanish Entrada: Conquest, Resistance, and Failure at Tampa Bay (1528–1600s)

Posted on July 18, 2026 by nathanalbright

Abstract This paper examines Tampa Bay as the landing ground for the two earliest large armed European expeditions into the North American interior—those of Pánfilo de Narváez in 1528 and Hernando de Soto in 1539—and as the setting for the … Continue reading →

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Warfare and Defense in Pre-Columbian Tampa Bay

Posted on July 18, 2026 by nathanalbright

Abstract This paper reconstructs the organization of conflict and defense among the indigenous peoples of the Tampa Bay estuary in the centuries before sustained European contact. Drawing on the archaeology of the Safety Harbor culture, the political geography implied by … Continue reading →

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Constitutional Founding and the Emoluments Quarrel

Posted on July 10, 2026 by nathanalbright

Abstract. The constitutional case supplies what the university case could not: a founding documented in enough contemporaneous detail that the gap between the idealized origin and the operational norms can be measured rather than merely alleged. This paper names that … Continue reading →

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The Rarity of Endurance: Regime Longevity, the 250-Year Threshold, and the Barriers to Institutional Permanence: A White Paper

Posted on July 5, 2026 by nathanalbright

Abstract On the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of American independence, this paper examines a claim easy to assert and hard to defend: that the United States has “lasted 250 years,” and that such longevity is exceptional. Both halves of … Continue reading →

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“I’m Your Huckleberry”: Doc Holliday, the Fragile Gunman, and What America Asks of Its Violence

Posted on June 27, 2026 by nathanalbright

Abstract In George P. Cosmatos’s Tombstone (1993), the nominal hero is Wyatt Earp, the lawman who restores order to a lawless silver town. Yet the character who has lodged most durably in the American imagination is not the lawman but … Continue reading →

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