"I talked to historian William C. Davis, who wrote The Rogue Republic: How Would-Be Patriots Waged the Shortest Revolution in American History, about this odd,

"I talked to historian William C. Davis, who wrote The Rogue Republic: How Would-Be Patriots Waged the Shortest Revolution in American History, about this odd, short-lived country." To me, this summarizes a lot of popular history writing in a nutshell. A professional historian or writer finds an obscure, odd but interesting moment in history, and writes about it, making it seem larger than life and perhaps more important than it really was. A very short lived self declared West Florida Republic certainly qualifies as obscure, and in the grand scheme of things not particularly relevant.