Episode Overview
A native of Miami, Sebastian Garcia’s parents emigrated from Colombia with a clear theory of his success in America: a career in medicine, law, or engineering. He entered the University of Central Florida as a biomedical sciences major and lasted two semesters before adding a second major in history.
His work spans a narrative series about the First Seminole War and his master’s thesis about a 1920s Irish Catholic governor undone by a Protestant radio station that formed specifically to destroy him.
Sebastian and I met when I came back to UCF in 2022 on the Play All Night book launch tour. He ran the department podcast. He was sharp, curious, and engaged. It remains one of the best interviews I’ve ever done.1
Our Crossroads
Sebastian and I each hold undergraduate and graduate history degrees from the University of Central Florida. Same department decades apart.
In October 2022, the department hosted me for a homecoming in the truest sense of the word. Sebastian interviewed me about Play All Night for Knights HistoryCast.2
He came prepared. And the book hit the right notes for him. It was a joy to sit with a young historian at my alma mater who understood exactly what I was trying to do and why.
We share a conviction that history belongs outside the walls of the academy, in history as storytelling in audio, video, prose, in whatever medium puts the story in front of people who need it.
Sebastian was already living that when we met four years ago. Following his work and career continues to be a joy.
“History doesn’t change. Our interpretations do.”
The Conversation
Sebastian called it liberation: the moment history stopped being an academic subject and became a way of seeing the world. It happened in a history class, tracking how the present shaped the people doing the writing. Once you see that, you can’t unsee it.
A first-generation Colombian American, Sebastian grew up in a Spanish-speaking Miami neighborhood. English came from school and television. UCF, four hours north, was a genuine culture shock—the first time he was consistently around people who didn’t look or sound like him. He’s still working out what “southerner” means. Orlando taught him the question exists in the first place.
We spent considerable time on public memory. Monuments and memorials are historical arguments set in stone and what doesn’t earn mention means as much as what does, even more.
That conversation led to his latest endeavor, The Memory of Negro Fort, a podcast series about a British fortification in the Florida panhandle that became the largest autonomous community of freedom seekers in American history. Andrew Jackson destroyed it in 1816, illegally, sparking the first of three American wars against Florida’s Seminoles.3
Sebastian wrote his master’s thesis on Governor Alfred E. Smith of New York. An Irish Catholic from the Lower East Side, Smith’s radio presence was powerful enough that opponents founded a radio station, WHAP (We Hold America Protestant) in response. Sebastian argues that public optimism that radio could rectify social rot, didn’t collapse in the 1930s with Father Coughlin and Benito Mussolini. The trust in the new technology cratered in the 1920s. Smith is an example of his thesis.
We closed on community—family, his fiancée, the professors worth keeping close, the difference between being in an institution and having a home in one.
Resources
Bob Beatty, Play All Night: Duane Allman and the Journey to Fillmore East—https://www.amazon.com/dp/0813069505.
Bob Beatty and Sebastian Garcia, Knights HistoryCast, October 2022. https://knightshistorycast.podbean.com/e/episode-24-dr-bob-beatty-and-play-all-night-duane-allman-and-the-journey-to-fillmore-east/.
Paid members of Long Live the ABB receive early access to Conversation from the Crossroads episodes.
Matthew J. Clavin, The Battle of Negro Fort: The Rise and Fall of a Fugitive Slave Community (New York: New York University Press, 2019).
Sebastian Garcia
David Halberstam, Playing for Keeps: Michael Jordan and the World He Made (New York: Random House, 1999).
Gary R. Mormino and George E. Pozzetta, The Immigrant World of Ybor City: Italians and Their Latin Neighbors in Tampa, 1885–1985 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987).
Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London: Verso, 1991).
Joan W. Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” American Historical Review 91:5 (1986).
Bill Simmons, The Book of Basketball: The NBA According to the Sports Guy (New York: Ballantine Books, 2009).
