Florida

Most people think America's oldest city is somewhere in New England. It's not. St. Augustine, Florida was founded by the Spanish in 1565.

That's 42 years before Jamestown and 55 years before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock.

Long before the Spanish showed up, the Timucua, Calusa, Apalachee, and other Native peoples had lived across the peninsula for thousands of years. In 1513, Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de León became the first known European to set foot here. He claimed the land for Spain and named it La Florida after the Spanish Easter celebration, Pascua Florida.

Spain, France, and Britain all fought over Florida for the next 250 years. In 1738, the Spanish governor near St. Augustine set up Fort Mose as a home for enslaved people who had escaped from British colonies to the north.

It became the first free Black settlement in what's now the United States, more than a century before the Civil War.

The U.S. took control of Florida from Spain in 1821 and immediately tried to push the Seminole people off their land. The Seminoles fought back. Hard.

The Second Seminole War lasted seven years, cost the government $20 million, and killed more than 1,500 American soldiers. A young leader named Osceola became the face of the resistance until the Army captured him under a fake flag of truce.

A few hundred Seminoles refused to leave and disappeared into the Everglades. They never signed a peace treaty. They still call themselves "the Unconquered."

Florida joined the U.S. as a slave state in 1845. After the Civil War, it took decades for the state to rebuild, and segregation held on fiercely well into the 1960s.

You can walk through the Castillo de San Marcos in St. Augustine, a stone fortress the Spanish finished in 1695 that survived every attack thrown at it. Over at Kennedy Space Center on the Space Coast, you can stand beneath the actual rockets that launched astronauts to the moon.

In the Everglades, the only place on Earth where alligators and crocodiles live side by side, you can take an airboat ride through a million acres of sawgrass and swamp. Then head to Ybor City in Tampa and grab a Cuban sandwich pressed the way they've made it there for over a hundred years.