Miami Daily News from July 14th, 1929.

“The University of Florida Herbarium is a unit of the Department of Natural History of the Florida Museum of Natural History. The herbarium is affiliated with the Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences, Florida Agricultural Experiment Station, Florida Cooperative Extension Service, Department of Biology and the Department of Plant Pathology. The FLAS acronym is the standard international abbreviation for the University of Florida Herbarium. It is derived from the herbarium’s early association with the Florida Agricultural Experiment Station.”

This was one of the more interesting and rewarding projects I’ve worked on in a long time so I thought I would share it.

The New South was a semi-weekly newspaper published in Jacksonville in the 1870s. Although it is impossible to know the exact ‘reason’ for its publication, it appears that advertising and promotion of the State of Florida in the years following the Civil War is its chief aim. This was a time when the South greatly needed Northern money to kick start its economy. The University of Florida Digital Collections includes 9 issues ranging from January of 1875 until June of that same year.

You’ll never know what you’ll find in the University of Florida Digital Collections. Like maybe The Ringling Collection that includes a picture of John Wilkes Booth when his only fame came from his acting.

(You’ll notice that some of my posts don’t contain a whole lot of writing on my part. That’s because they contain information that I want to share but that needs no real introduction or explanation from me. I just want you to know that the resource is out there and how to get to it. These posts may include a great deal of quotes from the particular site I’m sending you to. Please notice the quotation marks, instead of trying to rewrite the same information in a different way, I’ve just included what those who most probably know more about the subject, have already written.)

The University of Florida Digital Collection (UFDC) contains a myriad of unique items that I’ve found quite interesting. The British Parliamentary Debates of 1803-1891 is one such collection.

I learned from the UFDC cover page for this collection that this particular collection is “not available online either from the official Hansard Parliamentary records for both the House of Commons and the House of Lords or from the TheyWorkForYou.com site administered by the mySociety project of the UK Citizens Online Democracy organization.”

This time frame includes such things as “the Napoleonic Wars, the Peninsular Wars, the War of 1812, British support of nationalist activities in Latin America, the Irish Potato Famine, slavery, British colonial expansion, the corn laws, and the enclosure acts, just to name a few.”

“The Debates of this period, 1803-1891, are particularly valued for their insight into British history and politics, as well as the United Kingdom’s place in European history and especially that of Ireland. But, the Debates are also highly prized for their record of the Empire’s growth and administration, including colonies in Africa, Asia and the Caribbean.”

If you are interested in world history and especially that of the British Empire, these resouces will interest you to no end. If your not actually interested in History but need a place to gather facts, it will also serve you well.