Did you know that Miami is the only major city in the United States to have two national parks as borders? Everglades National Park borders the city to the west. Biscayne National Park lies to the southeast. Find out more about this fascinating city in Miami, part of the American Cities series. American Cities takes young readers on a tour of our capitals and major centers. Each book explores the geography, history, and people that give the featured city its distinctive flair. This is an AV2 media enhanced book. A unique book code printed on page 2 unlocks multimedia content. This book comes alive with video, audio, weblinks, slideshows, activities, hands-on experiments, and much more.

This history details the tumultuous lives of Miami Beach’s mid-twentieth century jet set, and features archival photos. From roughly 1930 to 1960, Miami Beach attracted an exclusive colony of socialites, who mixed with Hollywood celebrities and dignitaries, such as Winston Churchill, as effortlessly as tonic mixes with gin. Elizabeth Taylor announced her ill-fated engagement to the son of a former ambassador in Miami Beach. Other movie stars, such as Veronica Lake, were filmed in the enclave. Beautiful model Bab Beckwith, the first Orange Bowl Parade queen, dated John F. Kennedy while he was in Miami in 1944. Speedboat king Gar Wood bought his mistress a $100,000 bayfront home and then sued to force her to vacate the property. A tumultuous affair between John Jacob Astor VI and Lucille Stiglich led to the young model serving time in the Miami Beach jail. Deborah C. Pollack delves into an era filled with excitement, style, humor and panache.

This study focuses on street art and large-scale murals in metropolitan Miami/Dade County, while also foregrounding the diasporic and aesthetic interventions made by migrant and second-generation artists whose families hail from the Caribbean and Latin America. Jana Evans Braziel argues that Caribbean and Latinx street artists define and visually mark the city of Miami as a diasporic, transnational urban space. These artists also help define Miami as a cosmopolitan city, yet one that is also a distinctly Caribbean and Latinx urban space, and simultaneously resist but also (at times reluctantly) participate in the forces of gentrification and urban re/development, particularly through the myriad and complex ways in which street art contributes to city branding and art tourism. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, urban studies, American studies, and Latin American/Caribbean studies.

While the Naval base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba is well-known for its infamous prison camp, few people are aware of its prior use as an immigrant detention center for Haitian and Cuban refugees. Beginning in August 1994, the United States government declared that thousands of Cubans who had launched themselves into the Florida Straits on rickety rafts were "illegal refugees" and sent them to join over fifteen thousand Haitians already being held on Guantánamo after fleeing a violent coup in Haiti. Escape to Miami recounts the gripping stories of the rafters who were detained in Guantánamo during the 1994-1996 Cuban Rafter Crisis. After working in the camps for a year as an employee of the U.S. Justice Department, Elizabeth Campisi conducted life history interviews with twelve of the rafters, chronicling their departures from Cuba, their rafting trips, life on the base, and their initial experiences in Cuban Miami. Through these remarkable narratives, the book details the ways in which the rafters used creative expression, such as performance and artwork, to cope with the traumas they experienced in the camp. Campisi explores these coping mechanisms, showing that, when people work through individually-traumatic experiences as a group, the new meanings they create during that process can come together to change existing cultures or create new ones. Vivid and engaging, Escape to Miami gives voice to the untold stories of Guantánamo. This book is a must-read for anyone interested in policy, Latin American history, and human rights.

This book conceptualizes community nutrition resilience as a critical area that is currently lacking the attention it requires from both the public and private sectors. The book spotlights Greater Miami’s resilience efforts, both responding to slowly developing challenges such as immigration, environmental deterioration, and the wealth distribution gap, as well as sudden disasters such as hurricanes or flooding driven by climate change. Drawing on existing literature as well as interviews with professionals working in the field, the author makes recommendations on how to incorporate food systems into urban resilience planning, how to prioritize resilience on urban food agendas, and how to strengthen food system resilience through public, private, and third sector level engagement. She also highlights how the availability of and access to nutritious food impact the health, performance, and well-being of communities in the region, thus making a strong case for the prioritization of this growing issue.