Kevin Kokomoor, PhD
Biography
Kevin Kokomoor is originally from Englewood, Florida, and received his B.A. and M.A. in History at the University of South Florida, and his Ph.D. in History at Florida State University. He is currently a full-time faculty member in the history department at Coastal Carolina University in Conway, SC, where he teaches American history survey courses and upper level courses on Native America, Colonial and Early Republican America, the Early Southeast, and the Atlantic World.
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Kevin is also an active researcher and writer, having authored three scholarly books and several articles in regional and national history journals. He has also received funding from many of the finest libraries and societies in pursuit of his research, including the American Philosophical Society, the Clements Library at the University of Michigan, and the Filson Historical Society. ​
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Pre-Order The Cherokee War of 1776:
The Cherokee War of 1776
Native Destruction at the Dawn of American Independence
The forgotten history of the US war against the Cherokee offers a crucial reframing of America's origin story.
Americans remember 1776 as the year liberty was declared, the moment they cast off tyranny and proclaimed the self-evident truths of equality and freedom. But that same summer, as patriots celebrated their defiant new nation, American armies launched another campaign—this one aimed at destroying the Cherokee nation.
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Kevin Kokomoor's The Cherokee War of 1776 shows that it is impossible to understand the American Revolution in the South without recognizing the centrality of the Cherokees and settler colonialism. On the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, this important contribution could not be more timely.
— Jeffrey Ostler, University of Oregon
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Kevin Kokomoor has given us the first book-length study of the Cherokee War of 1776. This fine book does not just bust many myths about the Cherokees, in exploring the nuances of settler-native conflict, Kokomoor has also given us a tome for our own times.
— Woody Holton, author of Liberty is Sweet: The Hidden History of the American Revolution
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In this important and ambitious book on the Cherokee theater of the American Revolution, Kevin Kokomoor offers a range of critical new perspectives and insights drawn from extensive research and interpretation. Few know that more revolutionary forces marched upon and burned Cherokee villages in 1776 than in any other military campaign of that year or that such forces were not under the command of the Continental Congress but determined state governments, particularly South Carolina. As he concludes 'nothing about the 1776 Cherokee War seems peripheral,' as this book so clearly establishes.
— Ned Blackhawk, Yale University
La Florida
Catholics, Conquistadores, and Other American Origin Stories
La Florida explores a Spanish thread to early American history that is unfamiliar or even unknown to most Americans. As this book uncovers, it was Spanish influence, and not English, which drove America’s early history. By focusing on America’s Spanish heritage, this collection of stories complicates and sometimes challenges how Americans view their past, which author Kevin Kokomoor refers to as “the country’s founding mythology.”
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Dig deeper into Hispanic and Caribbean history, and how important happenings elsewhere in the Spanish colonial world influenced the discovery and colonization of the American Southeast. Follow Spanish sailors discovering the edges of a new continent and greedy, violent conquistadors quickly moving in to find riches, along with Catholic missionaries on their search for religious converts. Learn how Spanish colonialism in Florida sparked the British’s plans for colonization of the continent and influenced some of the most enduring traditions of the larger Southeast. The key history presented in the book will challenge the general assumption that whatever is important or interesting about this country is a product of its English past.
Buy La Florida:
Buy Of One Mind and of One Government
Seriously...buy one. My royalty check for all of last year was literally like $50.
Of One Mind and Of One Government
The Rise and Fall of the Creek Nation in the Early Republic
"This book contributes immensely to the field of ethnohistory in its expert examination of Creek politics in the early nineteenth century and its placement of the Creek Nation into a larger context of nation building."—Alex Colvin, Chronicles of Oklahoma
“A stunning book about an indigenous people’s valiant attempts to stand up to American expansionism through an internal political revolution—an attempt that ultimately failed, not because the Creeks could not realize a new political order but because America would not let them. It is just brilliant.”—Robbie Ethridge, professor of anthropology at the University of Mississippi and author of Mapping the Mississippian Shatter Zone: The Colonial Indian Slave Trade and Regional Instability in the American South
“The subject is vital. Nationalism encompasses all people in the early nineteenth century. The Creek National Council has been a source of contention for a long time. [The book’s] bold thesis, advocating the efficacy of the Creek National Council, will generate productive debate for years to come.”—Steven C. Hahn, professor of history at St. Olaf College and author of The Invention of the Creek Nation, 1670–1763
Media
Book Talks, Signings, and Scheduled Media Events
Interviews, Talks, and Podcasts
Education
Florida State University
Ph.D., American History
2013
The University of South Florida
M.A., History
2008
The University of South Florida
B.A., History
2006
East Tennessee State University
Too Much Partying, Not enough Studying...
A Few Selected Publications...
A Re-assessment of Seminoles, Africans, and Slavery on the Florida Frontier
Florida Historical Quarterly, 2008
Winner of the Florida Historical Society's 2009 Arthur W. Thompson Award for the most outstanding article published by the Florida Historical Quarterly in 2008
