A transformational gift received in 2023 was the catalyst for the Allen Lastinger Center for Florida History, which will hold its grand opening in the spring of 2025. It will be an interdisciplinary center for academic excellence housed within University of North Florida’s Thomas G. Carpenter Library. It will house the Lastinger’s donated collection of unique and historic Floridian artifacts, books and maps. Most of the collection will be digitized and globally available to UNF faculty and students and audiences outside of UNF who wish to learn about Florida history. The Allen Lastinger Center for Florida History collects primary and secondary source material related to the state of Florida's transportation and economic industries, from Precontact to the present, placing Florida history within the larger context of the history of the United States and Atlantic world. Comprised of books, maps, manuscripts, postcards, and other ephemera, the Center’s foundational collection has a strong focus on banking, tourism, cartography, and trade.
We are temporarily located on the first floor, in Special Collections and University Archives. We are open to the UNF community as well as the public. Please see the Visiting tab for further details.
We gratefully acknowledge that the University of North Florida is on the unceded ancestral homelands of the Mocama-speaking Timucuas. We recognize that other Indigenous peoples also built homelands here, including the Yamasees and Guales. For thousands of years, Indigenous peoples made this region into a vibrant center of diplomacy, exchange, and religious practice. We pay respect to these nations and to their descendants.
We further recognize the historical and ongoing impact of colonization in our region and state as well as the resiliency of Indigenous peoples. Today, Florida is home to the sovereign nations of the Seminole Tribe of Florida and Miccosukee Tribe of Indians of Florida, as well as citizens of other Native nations and communities whose ancestors include Mocamas, Yamasees, and Guales.
Mission
It is the mission of the Allen Lastinger Center for Florida History to provide an inclusive and supportive space for the study, use, and stewardship of historical materials related to the history of the state of Florida; supporting student and faculty success as well as the larger community of those interested in the materials.
Vision
The Allen Lastinger Center for Florida History aims to be a global resource for scholars and community members who seek to expand their knowledge about the state of Florida, through both in-person and digital platforms.
Values
Collaboration: We seek opportunities for collaboration, physically and digitally, with local, national, and international partners.
Acknowledgement: We recognize that the history of the state of Florida, the United States, and larger Atlantic world involves historically underrepresented people, who have been removed from or misrepresented in traditional narratives. We strive to include these voices and communities in the historical narrative as we collect, interpret, and reinterpret historical materials.
Technology-focused: We leverage technology to provide access to our materials, creating opportunities for interaction and learning across a broad audience.
Stewardship: We exercise the utmost care of our collections, physical and digital, following accepted industry standards for arrangement, description, preservation, digitization, and access.
Allen Lastinger’s fascination with Florida history sparked while he was delving into his great-grandfather’s past, who had settled in what is now Jefferson County in the 1820s. During his research, Allen stumbled upon unfamiliar locations and place names that were absent from modern maps. This discovery ignited his curiosity, leading him to amass a growing collection of maps. He began seeking out maps from both before and after Florida achieved statehood, eager to understand the state’s and region’s transformation over time.
Allen’s passion for collecting soon expanded beyond maps to include books, prints, and various ephemera related to Florida’s towns, cities, counties, inhabitants, and even Barnett Bank.
In 2023, Allen donated his extensive collection to the Thomas G. Carpenter Library at the University of North Florida, ensuring that others could benefit from his efforts. This generous donation, plus an additional significant financial contribution, led to the establishment of the Allen Lastinger Center for Florida History. Allen hopes that the center will inspire a deeper interest in Florida’s history and encourage further research into the state’s and region’s rich past.
The Allen Lastinger Center for Florida History is fortunate to have an advisory council of interested faculty, whose academic fields of interest align with the center's mission. These individuals give their time to provide guidance and subject matter expertise to the Librarian. The 2024-2025 council is made up of the following faculty:
Keith Ashley (Ph.D. University of Florida, 2003) is an archaeologist and associate professor of anthropology. His current research focuses on the Indigenous peoples and histories of southeastern North America, particularly Florida. Presently, he is exploring the involvement of St. Johns River fisher-hunter-gatherers in the broader world of Indigenous farmers during the 10th through the 13th centuries CE. His research also delves into the 16th and 17th century social landscape of the Indigenous Timucua-speaking Mocama. He is actively involved in archaeological excavations with UNF students throughout northeastern Florida.
Christopher Baynard is Associate Professor in Geospatial Technologies in the Department of Economics and Geography. He joined the Coggin College of Business in 2008, where he teaches courses in GIS (Intro and Intermediate), GIS and economic geography, remote sensing and aerial photography and mapping, as well as directed independent study classes. Additionally, Professor Baynard has developed and led Study-Abroad courses focused on the wine industry, renewable energy, and natural resource management in Argentina and Chile, Spain and Portugal, Holland and Germany.
James Beasley is an associate professor at the University of North Florida where he teaches rhetorical history, theory, and research. His work has been published in CCCC, Rhetoric Review, and Enculturation. He is the author of Rhetoric at the University of Chicago and the co-author of Dramatism and Musical Theater: Experiments in Rhetorical Performance with Kimberly Eckel Beasley, both published by Peter Lang Publishing.
Denise Bosey is associate professor of history at the University of North Florida and North American editor-in-chief of the Ethnohistory journal. She received her BA from Princeton University and her PhD from Yale University. Her teaching and research focus on Florida, local Indigenous history, public and digital humanities, and the Native South. Her award-winning publications include The Yamasee Indians: From Florida to South Carolina (University of Nebraska Press 2018). Her forthcoming book Yamasee: Indigenous Mobility and Power in the Early South, is under contract with the Omohundro Institute at the University of North Carolina Press. She is currently working with Dr. Keith Ashley on a public-facing book and digital humanities site that examine the deep history of the Mocamas, Guales, and Yamasees of Northeast Florida. This work is being funded by a 3-year National Endowment for the Humanities Collaborative Research grant. For more see https://indigenousflorida.domains.unf.edu/
P. Scott Brown is professor of Art History and interim dean of the Dean of the Hicks Honors College at UNF.
Charles Closmann is associate professor of History at UNF.
Jenny K. Hager professor of Sculpture at the University of North Florida, received her MFA in Sculpture and Digital Media from San Jose State University in San Jose, CA. Interested in a variety of processes and materials, she finds inspiration in dreams, objects from her childhood, gadgets, sea life and other curiosities. She is also very interested in collaboration; the spirit of community important in both her teaching practice and in her own work. Hager’s work has been exhibited across the country and recently in the Cymru Ironstone Castle Exhibition in Wales, the Pedvale Open-Air Art Museum in Latvia and Il Giardino di Daniel Spoerri in Seggiano, Italy. Flight Lab, a video installation by Hager, has traveled to the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans and York, Pennsylvania. Hager’s most recent series “Second Line” celebrates diversity of culture, individual storytelling and the spirit of the Second Line tradition of New Orleans parade culture. In this series, Hager creates large-scale parade animals inspired by the Chinese zodiac and infused with a personal narrative.
Laura Heffernan is professor of English and one of the founding directors of the Digital Humanities Institute at UNF. Her research focuses on literary and archival histories of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She is co-author, with Rachel Sagner Buurma, of The Teaching Archive: A New History for Literary Study (University of Chicago Press, 2021), an award-winning disciplinary history of English that draws on archival evidence of teaching practice gathered from dozens of university and college archives in the US and the UK. At UNF, Dr. Heffernan has helped to elevate the study of local history by establishing curriculum and training for UNF students to learn archival processing and complete internships with local historical societies and museums. In 2021, along with UNF colleagues Dr. Tru Leverette-Hall and Dr. Clayton McCarl, Dr. Heffernan secured funding from the National Endowment of the Humanities to complete the Viola Muse Digital Edition. She is currently at work on a book about Muse and the other men and women who formed the Negro Writers Unit of the Florida Federal Writers project (1936-40) here in Jacksonville.
Kevin Pfeil is assistant professor School of Computing at UNF.
