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| Review | Journal of Social History, 40.1 | The History Cooperative
40.1  
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Fall, 2006
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REVIEWS

SECTION 5
REGIONAL TOPICS

Land of Sunshine, State of Dreams: A Social History of Modern Florida. By Gary R. Mormino (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005. xvii plus 457 pp. $34.95).
Land of Sunshine, State of Dreams is the thirty-sixth monograph published in The Florida History and Culture Series, which is edited by Raymond Arsenault and Gary Mormino. Earlier volumes focused on places (titles include The Everglades, Casadaga, Miami, Jacksonville, and The Florida Resort Hotels), politics (Claude Pepper and Ed Ball; Government in the Sunshine State: Florida since Statehood; and Politics and Growth in Twentieth-Century Tampa), pre-20th-century history ( The Seminole Wars, The Proslavery Writings of Zephaniah Kingsley, and Pensacola during the Civil War), and the environment (Florida's Space Coast and In the Eye of Hurricane Andrew). Several works focus on specific segments of the population. In this category are two books on the Seminoles, several biographies, as well as Female Activists in Twentieth-Century Florida; Gladesmen: Gator Hunters, Moonshiners, and Skiffers; Florida's Farmworkers in the Twenty-first Century; Hitler's Soldiers in the Sunshine State; and The Invisible Empire: The Ku Klux Klan. 1
      Gary Mormino's sprightly and informative account ably treats many of these topics. Land of Sunshine, State of Dreams weaves demographic, social, cultural, environmental, political and economic themes into an overarching thesis. The narrative asserts that Florida changed more since 1940 than during the state's first four centuries. "Florida remains a state of enchanted reality and shattered dreams, of second chances and the trifecta at Gulfstream," asserts Mormino. "Florida held no monopoly on American dreamstates, but unlike in sunny rivals Hawaii and California, fantasies could be validated in Florida on the cheap" (p. 3). . . .
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