LAKELAND, Fla. (September 28, 2011) – Florida Southern College’s Lawton M. Chiles Jr. Center for Florida History presents Frank Laumer:  “Soldiers, Seminoles, and Slavery:  Florida and the Second Seminole War” on October 6th, 2011.  Mr. Laumer’s lecture, the second of the 2011-2012 Florida Lecture Series season, will be held at 7:00 p.m. in the Hollis Room located in the Thad Buckner Building on the Florida Southern Campus in Lakeland. This event is free and open to the public.

Frank Laumer knows Florida’s history down to the bone – literally. He personally exhumed and examined the bones of Ransom Clark, one of only two survivors of the first battle of the Second Seminole War. Laumer studied the bones to confirm Clark’s tale of heroic courage in which he was shot five times before crawling 50 miles over three days to report the dreadful news.  For nearly 50 years, Laumer has devoted himself to conducting this kind of in-depth analysis of the battle, which sparked the longest Indian war in U.S. history.

“Frank Laumer has spent nearly a lifetime studying the causes and circumstance leading to Florida’s Second Seminole War,” noted James M. Denham, Director of the Lawton M. Chiles Jr. Center for Florida History and FSC history professor.  “Those who attend his Oct. 6 program will gain a fuller appreciation of this largely forgotten, yet extremely significant event in Florida’s territorial years.”

Frank Laumer, an amateur historian published Massacre! (1968), the first full length account of Maj. Francis Langhorne Dade’s fateful battle with the Seminoles, which occurred on December 28, 1835.  But nearly thirty more years of research and sifting of evidence convinced Laumer that the full story had not yet been told.  Finally in 1995, Laumer published Dade’s Last Command, a work commended as definitive by leading authorities in the field.  Laumer’s most recent book is Nobody’s Hero (2008), a novelized account of Ransom Clark’s experience.

About the Florida Lecture Series
In its 16th year, the Florida Lecture Series at Florida Southern College is a forum that brings speakers to the FSC campus who explore Florida life and culture from a wide range of disciplines, including history, public affairs, law, sociology, criminology, anthropology, literature, and art. The overall objective of the series is to bring members of the community, the faculty, and the student body together to interact with and learn from leading scholars in their fields.