Florida

The oldest European settlement in the country and the last part of the east coast to become American. St Augustine was founded by Spain in 1565, forty-two years before Jamestown, and Spanish Florida was a strategic buffer rather than a profitable colony - it offered freedom to enslaved people escaping from British Carolina and Georgia, and Fort Mose near St Augustine was the first free Black settlement in what became the United States. Britain held it briefly from 1763, Spain regained it in 1783, and Andrew Jackson's incursions forced its cession in 1819. The Seminole, formed partly from Creek migrants and partly from those escaped Africans, fought three wars; the second, from 1835 to 1842, was the longest and most expensive war against Native Americans in American history, and the Seminole were never formally defeated. Statehood came in 1845. Air conditioning, mosquito control and the interstates turned a sparsely populated state into the third most populous. Cuban exile after 1959 remade Miami. Cape Canaveral has launched American spaceflight since the 1950s. The Everglades are being partly restored after decades of drainage. The state is a permanent presidential swing point. Tallahassee is the capital and Jacksonville the largest city by area. The peninsula runs about eight hundred kilometres into the Atlantic and Gulf. No point in the state is more than about a hundred kilometres from salt water. Disney World opened near Orlando in 1971. Its highest point is barely a hundred metres. The state has more golf courses than any other and the largest share of residents over sixty-five.

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