Admission Fee: $5 Pay at the Door
David Head will join McGough Nature Park for a presentation on Pirates, Privateers, and the Fall of Spain’s Empire: How Spanish American Independence Brought Florida to the United States. The program takes place Dec 2nd, 2023, 12:00pm at McGough Nature Park. It is a partnership between Florida Humanities and The City of Largo as part of the organization’s redesigned Florida Talks program.
David Head is an associate lecturer of history at the University of Central Florida. He has published four books, including Privateers of the Americas: Spanish American Privateering from the United States in the Early Republic, The Golden Age of Piracy: The Rise, Fall, and Enduring Popularity of Pirates, and A Crisis of Peace: George Washington, the Newburgh Conspiracy, and the Fate of the American Revolution, which was a finalist for the 2020 George Washington Book Prize.
Over two hundred years ago, in the summer of 1817, a group of pirates and privateers invaded Amelia Island, Florida, a Spanish colony, in hopes of striking a blow for the Spanish American Revolutions. This presentation tells the stories of these revolutionary rogues and their leaders, how they planned to free Florida from Spanish rule, and how the United States intervened to stop them.
