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The Swamp Peddlers: How Lot Sellers, Land Scammers, and Retirees Built Modern Florida and Transformed the American Dream with Jason Vuic (Indiana University Bloomington)
April 20, 2023 @ 7:00 pm
Join the Matheson History Museum and Dr. Jason Vuic for a discussion of his book The Swamp Peddlers: How Lot Sellers, Land Scammers, and Retirees Built Modern Florida and Transformed the American Dream which won the Phillip and Dana Zimmerman Gold Medal Prize for Florida Nonfiction at the 2021 Florida Book Awards, as well as the 2021 Charlton Tebeau Award for outstanding general interest book from the Florida Historical Society.
Attend in person at the Matheson History Museum or join on Zoom.
In-person registration:
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-swamp-peddlers-tickets-591515176817
Zoom Registration:
https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_Ln2S4V1JQnSCiFNPjV4cAg
In his this public lecture, Dr. Jason Vuic will dive into the history of the “installment land sales industry,” which seemingly appeared out of nowhere to sell billions of dollars of Florida residential property, sight unseen, to retiring northerners. For only $10 down and $10 a month, working-class pensioners could buy a piece of the Florida dream: a graded homesite waiting for them in a planned community when they were ready to build. The result was Cape Coral, Port St. Lucie, Deltona, Port Charlotte, Palm Coast, and Spring Hill, among many others–sprawling exurban communities with no downtowns and little industry but millions of residential lots. These communities allowed generations of northerners to move to Florida cheaply, but at a price: high-pressure sales tactics begat fraud; poor urban planning begat sprawl; developers cleared forests, drained wetlands, and built thousands of miles of roads in grid-like subdivisions, which, fifty years later, played an inordinate role in the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis.
Jason Vuic
Originally from Punta Gorda, Florida, Dr. Jason Vuic is a graduate of Wake Forest University, and holds an M.A. in history from the University of Richmond and a Ph.D. in history from Indiana University Bloomington. His first book, The Yugo: the Rise and Fall of the Worst Car in History (2010) was featured in Mother Jones and the Economist, and received rave reviews in over 100 print and web-based publications. In 2021, Jason Vuic published
This program is sponsored by the UF Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere with support from the Humanities Fund, the Gulf Research Program of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine under award number 2000013562, and the Florida Institute for Built Environment Resilience (FIBER).