Cracker: the Cracker Culture in Florida History.

Cracker: The Cracker Culture in Florida History. Second Edition. By Dana Ste.Claire. (Gainesville: Distributed by the University Press of Florida for the Museum of Arts and Sciences, Daytona Beach, Florida, c. 1998. Pp. 255. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 0-933053-13-4.)

Throughout the Deep South, cracker is often a fighting word that connotes a social standing below redneck and conveys images of bigotry and clannishness. These connotations are prevalent in Florida, but many denizens of the Sunshine State have recently placed a positive spin on the label, reclaiming the epithet as a badge of honor. Dana Ste.Clair is one of them. His sympathetic presentation of the history and culture of Florida crackers provides a fine resource for understanding how the cracker image is rooted in negative and positive aspects of Florida's regional identity. His book preserves a record of the Florida's cracker heritage and provides a sample of the state's cracker culture.

The book is written for a general audience, but specialists in history, anthropology, folklore, and related disciplines will appreciate this highly readable study. The book first explores the early history of Florida crackers. It then offers a sketch of Scottish, Scotch-Irish, and English parallels to cracker culture, ethnographic descriptions of rural cracker folkways, and a presentation of the vernacular architecture, material culture, foodways, and cultural traditions. Ste.Clair concludes with sketches of living history sites, a lexicon of folk speech, Florida trivia, and a bibliography. Scattered throughout the text are excellent historical photographs, interesting vignettes from a range of writers, vivid illustrations, and excerpts from interviews.

One of the book's strengths is its thorough discussion of stories and etymologies. Ste.Clair debunks the common idea that the term cracker originated as a reference to the cow whips carried by Florida cow hunters and provides careful and convincing consideration of this folk etymology. He challenges the idea that crackers were named for crackerbox houses, techniques for cracking corn, a propensity for eating biscuit crackers, and a malapropism derived from quaker. Instead, Ste.Clair notes that cracker has a history that stretches to at least 1509. William Shakespeare used the term in King John in 1595 to refer to an uncouth braggart, and Florida's rural residents were described as crackers in this manner by 1767. The linkage between the nickname and the cracking of whips did not appear in print until 1810.

The book has a few minor flaws. The discussion of Florida's vernacular architecture is too sketchy, and a fenestrated cracker-style house influenced by French vernacular traditions is misidentified as a shotgun house. The parallels between Anglo and Celtic cultural values and cracker cultural patterns make overly broad generalizations. This type of analysis is perhaps beyond the scope of a book written for a popular audience, and these concerns are not particularly serious. The book's wealth of stories, poetry, presentations of folk traditions, and well-chosen literary excerpts provide ample material for further studies of Florida's rural culture.

GREGORY HANSEN

Arkansas State University