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Brian Rucker, Ph.D., teaches history at Pensacola State College and is the author of numerous scholarly books and articles on Florida history. “Mistory” is his first published novel.
PSC Professor Brian Rucker releases his first novel, “Mistory”
Professor Brian Rucker, Ph.D., has written numerous nonfiction, scholarly books and articles about West Florida history. His latest book, however, is a fictitious tale that mixes regional history and mystery — thus the title “Mistory.”
Rucker’s first published novel follows Southeastern Alabama University History Professor Roger Winston in 2000, when his visit to an obscure, backwoods cemetery in Pike County, Alabama, lands him in the deadly sights of government agents. The author invites readers to join him for a “wild ride” that begins in the real-life early settlement mill town of Nathansville in South Alabama in 1832 and jumps to Winston’s dangerous research into the town’s mysterious sawmill accident.
“As a historian, I have spent a lot of time doing research in old remote cemeteries and old mill sites, so I incorporated a lot of the elements of a historian’s world into the story,” said Rucker. “The cemetery that inspired the one in the book is Coon Hill Cemetery in Chumuckla, Santa Rosa County, and it’s pictured on the book’s cover.”
While Rucker’s alter ego in the novel solves mysteries from the past, his real-life professorship at Pensacola State College has had him on the road visiting historical sites in and around West Florida while fulfilling the first year of a three-year endowed teaching chair award commitment.
Rucker was inducted into the college’s prestigious Academy of Teaching Excellence in 2000 and was later awarded the Mr. and Mrs. T.T. Wentworth Jr. Endowed Chair in American History established by the T.T. Wentworth Jr. Historical Foundation, which is funding student field trips to explore historical sites.
So far, he has led PSC students on educational expeditions to Apalachicola, Historic DeFuniak Springs, Eden Gardens State Park in Santa Rosa Beach, the Air Force Armament Museum in Valparaiso, the Arcadia Mill Archaeological Site and Museum in Milton, and the Indian Temple Mound Museum in Fort Walton Beach, as well as Providence Canyon State Park and the Jimmy Carter National Historical Park in Georgia.
“The students attending the field trips love the trips and often say, ‘I never knew this was here.’ It gets them out of their bubbles and opens their eyes to a world they did not know existed previously,” said Rucker.
Rucker naturally comes by his love for the region’s history with ancestral roots dating back through seven generations to the 1840s in Santa Rosa County. He has authored numerous books and articles about West Florida history, including “Mine Eyes Have Seen: Firsthand Reminiscences of the Civil War in West Florida,” “Arcadia and Bagdad: Industrial Parks of Antebellum Florida” and “Treasures of the Panhandle: A Journey Through West Florida.”
“Mistory” by Brian Rucker is available for checkout at PSC campus libraries.