1 Introduction to 2022-2023 Essays

The inaugural issue of Moss Culture features essays published by three former FSCJ Honors students. These essays share a focus on crises in Northeast Florida history, though they explore very different topics and time periods. While none of these crises are unprecedented or unique to Northeast Florida, each author reveals the distinctive effects they had and continue to have on Jacksonville’s history and culture.

Molly Paris’s essay, “Myths and Misrepresentations: The Distorted Image of the Timucua Two-Spirit People Across Three Centuries,” explores a crisis of representation that began with French and Spanish colonists in the sixteenth century and persisted for nearly 450 years. She traces the long and tragic history of how colonial writers and, ironically, well-meaning academics in the twenty-first century spread and perpetuated “derogatory stereotypes” of the non-binary Two-Spirit people and thus marginalized a group central to Timucuan culture.

In his essay, “The Great Fire of 1901: How Government Response Raised Jacksonville from the Ashes,” Carson Welch takes a unique perspective on perhaps the greatest crisis to befall Jacksonville in its history. He argues that the swift and decisive action taken by leaders in local and state government after the fire helps explain Jacksonville’s extraordinary rebirth as an economic hub of Florida and the South.

Jennifer Cika explores an environmental crisis that sullied Jacksonville’s reputation for many years in her essay, “What’s That Smell?: The Politics and Economics of Odor Control in Jacksonville during the 1980s.” Jacksonville was widely known during this time as “the city that stinks,” a place that prioritized the interests of the industries that created the odor problems over the well-being of its citizens and its own repute.