Join us at Governor’s House in St. Augustine to hear Susan R. Braden speak on the history and influence of the grand hotels of Henry Flagler and Henry Plant.  Braden, retired professor of art history at Auburn University, is author of The Architecture of Leisure, The Florida Resort Hotels of Henry Flagler and Henry Plant, published in 2002.  Her book is available as a free e-book by the University Press of Florida, one of the selections in the Mellon/NEH Humanities Open Book Program Grant awarded to the UF Press and Libraries. Thanks to the grant, 39 titles, including The Architecture of Leisure, are being re-born digitally to be available online as Open Access with ePub formats for different digital readers. All of the books will soon be available through major booksellers, as well as freely available in HathiTrust, the UF Digital Collections (http://ufdc.ufl.edu/openbooks), and other venues.

Braden takes us on a fascinating exploration of Florida’s Gilded Age Hotels and the ways in which they revolutionized the national imagination of Florida as a place of exoticism and luxury.  As she demonstrates, the luxury winter resorts of Flagler and Plant shared three characteristics—their elaborate architecture, self-contained estate-style independence, and conspicuous (often decidedly feminine) luxury, a recognition that women often outnumbered men as hotel guests.  Her presentation brings to life the interiors of the hotels as guests saw and used them, and demonstrates how the new hotel experience transformed Florida from frontier to tourist destination.