Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de Leon made landfall on Florida's southwest coast in 1513, though the exact location is a matter of very vigorous debate (and de Leon himself was convinced that Florida was in fact a "vast island").  Pedro Menendez de Aviles founded the city of St. Augustine in 1565.  There was a settlement at Pensacola prior to this, but the settlement disappeared and modern Pensacola was not founded until over 100 years after St. Augustine.  Britain gained control of Florida in 1763, then promptly lost it twenty years later at the end of the American Revolution.  The area remained under control of the Spanish until John Quincy Adams negotiated it away from them around 1820.

Spain had long had troubles in Florida and the area had never been heavily settled; the Seminole tribe resisted conversion to Catholicism and all attempts at domination by the Spanish; America would have the same problems.  A series of extremely brutal and bloody wars resulted first in the Seminole nation's agreement to leave Florida for land out west, and finally in the virtual extermination of the tribe in the Second Seminole War.  The treatment of the Seminole surely ranks among the worst treatment of any Native American nation by the United States.

Florida, like the rest of the South, did not prosper after the War.  Not until wealthy oil magnate Henry Flagler came to the state did much of anything happen.  South Florida was considered a wasteland, the Everglades a thing to be drained in hopes of creating new agricultural land.  Flagler arrived on the scene in the 1890's, and with his Florida East Coast Railroad created major tourist towns, first at St. Augustine, then Daytonia (later Daytona Beach), then at Palm Beach.   A hard freeze in 1895 convinced Flagler to extend his lines even farther south, into Miami and ultimately to Key West.  The old U.S. highway 1 to Key West sits atop the old Florida East Coast roadbed.  Flagler tried to build a railroad from Key West 90 miles across the Strait of Florida to Havana; he got six miles of causeway built before a hurricane came through and blew it all away in the early 1900's and ended the dream of a rail link to Cuba (imagine how different the world would be if he had succeeded!).

It was the FEC that got Florida moving.  Palm Beach, Fort Lauderdale, Miami Beach, and other posh society towns sprang up to service the American elite on their winter vacations.  Immigrants from points south were attracted to South Florida's Caribbean-esque climate.  Land speculation ran rampant through the 1920's, then collapsed with the onset of the depression.

But Florida's fate was sealed.  Tourism would remain the state's major industry up to the present day.  The 1959 revolution in Cuba sent waves of Cuban refugees to Key West and Miami; subsequent revolutions and economic trials have brought Haitians, Dominicans, Central Americans, and many others to Miami in search of a better life.  The rest of the state has grown, too, much as the whole South has grown.

Today Florida is the fourth largest state in the U.S. and among the fastest growing.