BOOKS
Watery Eden: A History of Wakulla Springs. Tallahassee: Sentry Press, 2002. “Walkulla Springs is a crossroads, a place where man and nature have been meeting for a thousand years,” writes Revels in Watery Eden. “Hopefully, man is a little better for the experience…” Author Revels shows a special adeptness in describing the earliest European visitors and many attempts to exploit the springs for profit. She clearly has done her homework as evidenced by numerous newspaper and journal excerpts and firsthand interviews. Revels writes with an active voice, and the book reads like an entertaining saga. Plus, vintage photographs are interspersed throughout the pages. Proceeds from the sale of the book enhance park activities.-Doug Alderson
Grander in Her Daughters: Florida’s Women During The Civil War. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2004.
Though the women of Florida suffered Civil War traumas and privations commensurate with women throughout the Confederacy, few of their experiences have become part of the historical record. With Grander in Her Daughters: Florida’s Women during the Civil War Tracy J. Revels rescues from neglect these women and the challenges they faced. Drawing largely on primary source discoveries, Revels recounts the experiences of wives and widows, Unionists and secessionists, black female slaves and their plantation mistresses, business owners and refugees. Revels finds that no matter their political allegiance, these women lived dual lives, divided in their loyalties between what they often perceived as the competing interests of their nation and their families.”The story of women in Civil War Florida is either untold or mythologized. In this finely crafted and engaging social portrait of Florida’s women during the Civil War, Tracy J. Revels fills this void. Revels’s compelling narrative, drawn largely from underutilized manuscript materials, offers general readers and scholars vivid images of Florida’s Civil War home front through the eyes of its women.”—James M. Denham, Department of History, Florida Southern College, and coeditor of Echoes from a Distant Frontier: The Brown Sisters’ Correspondence from Antebellum Florida.
Winner of the 2005 Rembert Patrick Prize for the best book in Florida History
Mostly Parodies. Café Press, 2009. A collection of humorous short stories and articles featuring the misadventures of Sherlock Holmes, Doctor Watson, and a cast of characters. Written as a fundraiser for the Sherlockian Scion Society in Greenville, The Survivors of the Gloria Scott.
ARTICLES AND ESSAYS
“My Favorite Florida Place: Wakulla Springs,” Forum: Magazine of the Florida Humanities Council, Winter 2004.
“Billy Sunday,” article in St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture, 2001.
“Grander in the Daughters: Florida’s Women During the Civil War,” Florida Historical Quarterly, Winter 1999.
“Florida in the 1940s,” in Florida’s Heritage of Diversity: Essays in Honor of Samuel Procter, Sentry Press, 1997.
“Ed Ball: Last of the Robber Barons,” in Florida Pathfinders, Saint Leo Press, 1994.
“Blitzkrieg of Joy: Florida Tourism During World War II,” in Florida at War, Saint Leo press, 1993.
“Volcano Was Wakulla Swamp Mystery,” Tampa Tribune, 20 August 1989.
