Matheson History Museum will host Dr. Boyd Murphree on Wednesday as he shares the history of Florida’s impact on presidential elections from 1876 to 2016.

The free event will start at 7 p.m. at 513 E. University Ave. in Gainesville.

Murphree, a political papers archivist for special and area studies collections at UF’s George A. Smathers Libraries, will talk about Florida’s role in some of the nation’s presidential primaries and general elections beginning with the 1876 contested Hayes-Tildon election through the Bush-Gore battle in 200 and the Trump-Clinton contest in 2016. Murphree will present images illustrating those elections from UF’s diverse holdings of presidential election documents, artifacts and publications.

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Murphree was an archivist with the State Archives of Florida in Tallahassee from 1998-2012 and left to as an assistant editor with the Papers of Abraham Lincoln in Springfield, Illinois. In 2016, he came to UF and, in 2020, the University Press of Florida published “The Governors of Florida,” a history of Florida’s governors from 1821 to 2018, which Murphree coedited. The book won the Florida Book Awards top honor for Florida non-fiction in 2020.