History
The micronation was founded in November 2005 in order to "reassert Britain's rights" over the region, by an individual identified on the micronation's website only as "Robert VII, Duke of Florida" The website asserts that Duke Robert "inherited the Peerage of the Dominion" in 1969, and "accepted the position of Governor General" in 1994. Since Duke Robert's retirement in 2007, the Acting Governor General has been Bo Register, a computer systems and networking consultant and former member of the US armed services. The micronation has issued cinderella stamps and has minted several base metal coins produced by Jorge Vidal and issued in denominations based on pre-decimal pounds.
The founders of the micronation assert that the US annexation was illegal, because control of the region had actually defaulted to the United Kingdom in 1808, upon the removal from office of King Charles IV of Spain, thus invalidating the Treaty of Paris and the US annexation to which it gave rise. This interpretation of historic events is not supported by any mainstream historian.
Read more about this topic: Dominion Of British West Florida
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“When we of the so-called better classes are scared as men were never scared in history at material ugliness and hardship; when we put off marriage until our house can be artistic, and quake at the thought of having a child without a bank-account and doomed to manual labor, it is time for thinking men to protest against so unmanly and irreligious a state of opinion.”
—William James (1842–1910)
“Indeed, the Englishman’s history of New England commences only when it ceases to be New France.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Modern Western thought will pass into history and be incorporated in it, will have its influence and its place, just as our body will pass into the composition of grass, of sheep, of cutlets, and of men. We do not like that kind of immortality, but what is to be done about it?”
—Alexander Herzen (1812–1870)