When the Civil War erupted, Florida was a rough and independent frontier state recognized by few outside of its boundaries. During the war Florida gave an equal amount of men, in ratio to the state's population, than any other Confederate state. Yet Florida's Civil War involvement remains hidden in the obscure shadow of the more influential Southern states.

Are the names Bradford, Dickison, Finegan, Lang, Pearson, or Perry familiar? What was the importance of the Battle of Santa Rosa Island? Why was the Florida Brigade criticized following the pivotal Battle of Gettysburg? What was Florida's home front like? What was the Cow Cavalry? What was Florida's Civil War Governor like?

The answers to these colorful questions are found within these pages. Florida's Civil War involvement was a substantial and costly one. Those who molded history way down upon the Suwannee River tell their amazing stories.

This is the final volume of a trilogy covering the fiction of New England, New York State and the other four Middle Atlantic states. The impetus for the present work (as for its predecessors) is the premise that creative writers, novelists especially, have nearly as much to tell us about the way we lived in the early years of our country as the historians and social scientists. Fiction as history has become a subject of research in recent years. The annotations in this bibliography are often quite extensive, covering many hard-to-find, long forgotten works, lending themselves to browsing by the general reader.

There are entertaining anecdotes of:

• How voters throughout the years have voted early and often.
• How soldiers first got the right to vote from the battlefield.
• How Times Square in its heyday prepared for election eve.
• The role of the electronic media in modern election days.

As the first popular history of our democratic process, Election Day takes the reader from oral voting during the colonial period right through to the present day use of optically scanned ballots. Readers accustomed to thinking of our autumn elections as orderly, well-supervised events will discover that boisterousness, fraudulence, hard drinking, and rioting have often marked the holiday in the past.

Both perspectives on the West are still alive. Some find in the virtual obliteration of Native American cultures and the despoiling of the land itself the loss of the West. But another impulse, toward energy, inventiveness, and community spirit, seems alive, especially evident in the smaller cities and larger towns along the route of the explorers. In such places the "landscape of hope" is very much alive. The experience of Lewis and Clark, then, parallels our experience today.

The primary story in Mary’s Master centers upon the captivity of one of the English women during that war, Mary Rowlandson. Her narrative is considered to be the most widely read American captivity story ever written. The accounts of other English captives reveal behavior by the natives that shows humanity in great contrast with the savagery attributed to them by most contemporary writers. Mary Rowlandson’s “master” is, Quanopin, a Narragansett sachem whom Mary admires despite all the anti-Indian rhetoric she has been exposed to by others. While their time together is brief, it is exceptional because she expresses an admiration for him not conveyed toward any other Indian, which was unusual for those times and still is today.

The primary story in Mary’s Master centers upon the captivity of one of the English women during that war, Mary Rowlandson. Her narrative is considered to be the most widely read American captivity story ever written. The accounts of other English captives reveal behavior by the natives that shows humanity in great contrast with the savagery attributed to them by most contemporary writers. Mary Rowlandson’s “master” is, Quanopin, a Narragansett sachem whom Mary admires despite all the anti-Indian rhetoric she has been exposed to by others. While their time together is brief, it is exceptional because she expresses an admiration for him not conveyed toward any other Indian, which was unusual for those times and still is today.