Tuesday 4 April, 12-2pm in Cornwallis North-West, Seminar Room 9

The Dream for a New (Disney) World; The idea, the plans and the creation of the Orlando, Florida Walt Disney Resort.

Konstantinos Karatzas, Associate Lecturer, University of Zaragoza, Spain

This lecture will focus on the first stages of the creation of Disney World in Orlando, Florida. The lecture will chronicle and describe the selection process of the site, purchases of land and the creation of the Reedy Creek Improvement District that encompasses the property. The lecture will analyse the tax assessor’s plats that used to identify and evaluate alternative World’s sites and also present feasibility studies, news releases and the early stages of the advertising campaign of the ‘New Disney World’.

Konstantinos D. Karatzas is a PhD Candidate at the Department of Modern and Contemporary History at the University of Zaragoza, Spain, specializing in African American history. His work focuses on the 1921 Tulsa, Oklahoma Race War, the Civil Rights Movement, the interpretation of violence and race in the United States along with the examination of collective memory. During the summer of 2017, Konstantinos was a visiting research scholar at the Universities of South Florida, Florida-Gainesville and Central Florida where he explored the modern history of Florida.