T. D. Allman

Allman's first book on Florida, "Miami: City of the Future" is considered the definitive work in its field. His history of Florida, Finding Florida: The True History of the Sunshine State, was a finalist for the National Book Award, and named one of the best works of history and non-fiction by Kirkus Reviews. The Florida Association of Authors and Publishers honored it as both the best overall book on Florida, 2013-2014, and the best book in the non-fiction for adults category.

Allman graduated with honors from Harvard University in 1966. His first book, Unmanifest Destiny, dealing with issues of American nationalism in U.S. foreign policy, grew out of his doctoral thesis at Oxford University, but his “definitive educational experience” occurred in the lowland town of Nepalganj, Nepal, after joining the Peace Corps in order to avoid the draft. “It's there,” he later wrote, “that I learned the most important thing of all. It is that all humans are truly, totally, completely, indivisibly, equal. What I learned in Nepalganj" he added, "has kept me alive in situations when I might have gotten killed." “After Nepalganj,” as was later reported in the National Geogaphic magazine, “T.D. Allman exposed the CIA’s secret war in Laos, rescued massacre victims in Cambodia, became an Edward R. Murrow Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, survived a kidnapping in Beirut, a bullet in Tiananmen Square, and a balloon crash in Kathmandu while reporting from more than 90 countries.”

T. D. Allman (born 1944) is an American author, historian, and journalist. "In 1968, at age twenty-three, T.D. Allman broke his first big story: the CIA's 'secret war,' against the Communists in Laos. He accomplished this by listening to local people, then trekking over mountains to a clandestine CIA base, Long Cheng. The news in his dispatches spurred congressional investigations and protests in America, and he went on to document the CIA's involvement in the overthrow of Prince Norodom Sihanouk in Cambodia. He later interviewed Yasser Arafat, Helmut Kohl, Boris Yeltsin, and Manuel Antonio Noriega as foreign correspondent for the magazine Vanity Fair. He has also written two best-selling, prize-winning books on Florida, and what events there reveal about the nature of America. One of his books on foreign policy added the phrase "Rogue State" to foreign policy discourse. He also was the first to popularize the term "secret war" to describe clandestine U.S. involvements in foreign wars.