I try to tell what it was like for me and my brother Marines without fanfare or bravado and give the reader a vivid description of my 13 months.

    With the authority of a scholar and the sparkle of an old-time storyteller, Dr. Volney Steele takes the reader from rotgut whiskey to modern anesthetics, from castor oil to antibiotics, and from barroom surgery to modern hospital operations. Dr. Steele wrote Bleed, Blister, and Purge "to shed light on and celebrate the dedication and humanitarianism of those many physicians, nurses, shamans, and people of sound practical sense who saw their patients--often friends and family--through the adversities that bedeviled them."

    Spot the stars in Hollywood, explore the Napa Valley's world-famous wineries and soak up the rays on SoCal's picturesque beaches; all with your trusted travel companion. Get to the heart of California and begin your journey now! Inside Lonely Planet's California Travel Guide: Color maps and images throughout Highlights and itineraries help you tailor your trip to your personal needs and interests Insider tips to save time and money and get around like a local, avoiding crowds and trouble spots Essential info at your fingertips - hours of operation, phone numbers, websites, transit tips, prices Honest reviews for all budgets - eating, sleeping, sight-seeing, going out, shopping, hidden gems that most guidebooks miss Cultural insights give you a richer, more rewarding travel experience - wildlife, landscapes, wine, cuisine, beaches, film, television, music, the arts, history, literature, politics More than 100 maps Covers San Francisco, Napa & Sonoma Wine Country, Yosemite & the Sierra Nevada, Los Angeles, San Diego, Disneyland & Orange County, Palm Springs, Santa Barbara and more eBook Features: (Best viewed on tablet devices and smartphones) Downloadable PDF and offline maps prevent roaming and data charges Effortlessly navigate and jump between maps and reviews Add notes to personalize your guidebook experience Seamlessly flip between pages Bookmarks and speedy search capabilities get you to key pages in a flash Embedded links to recommendations' websites Zoom-in maps and images Inbuilt dictionary for quick referencing The Perfect Choice: Lonely Planet California, our most comprehensive guide to California, is perfect for both exploring top sights and taking roads less traveled. Looking for a guide focused on one of California's major cities? Check out Lonely Planet's Los Angeles, San Diego & Southern California or San Francisco guides for a comprehensive look at all these cities have to offer; Discover San Francisco, a photo-rich guide to the city's most popular attractions; or Pocket Los Angeles and Pocket San Francisco, handy-sized guides focused on the can't-miss sights for a quick trip. Authors: Written and researched by Lonely Planet, Sara Benson, Andy Bender, Alison Bing, Celeste Brash, Tienlon Ho, Beth Kohn, Adam Skolnick, John A Vlahides About Lonely Planet: Since 1973, Lonely Planet has become the world's leading travel media company with guidebooks to every destination, an award-winning website, mobile and digital travel products, and a dedicated traveler community. Lonely Planet covers must-see spots but also enables curious travelers to get off beaten paths to understand more of the culture of the places in which they find themselves.

    The Gunfight at the O.K. Corral would shape how future generations came to view the Old West. Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, and the Clantons became the stuff of legends, symbolic of a frontier populated by good guys in white hats and villains in black ones. It's a colorful story--but the truth is even better. Drawing on new material from private collections--including diaries, letters, and Wyatt Earp's own hand-drawn sketch of the shootout's conclusion--as well as archival research, Jeff Guinn gives us a startlingly different and far more fascinating picture of what actually happened that day in Tombstone and why.

    J. Stiles offers a new understanding of the legendary outlaw Jesse James. Although he has often been portrayed as a Robin Hood of the old west, in this ground-breaking work Stiles places James within the context of the bloody conflicts of the Civil War to reveal a much more complicated and significant figure. Raised in a fiercely pro-slavery household in bitterly divided Misssouri, at age sixteen James became a bushwhacker, one of the savage Confederate guerrillas that terrorized the border states. After the end of the war, James continued his campaign of robbery and murder into the brutal era of reconstruction, when his reckless daring, his partisan pronouncements, and his alliance with the sympathetic editor John Newman Edwards placed him squarely at the forefront of the former Confederates’ bid to recapture political power. With meticulous research and vivid accounts of the dramatic adventures of the famous gunman, T. J. Stiles shows how he resembles not the apolitical hero of legend, but rather a figure ready to use violence to command attention for a political cause—in many ways, a forerunner of the modern terrorist.

    Thirty bullets were exchanged in thirty seconds, killing three men and wounding three others.The fight sprang forth from a tense, hot summer. Cattle rustlers had been terrorizing the back country of Mexico and selling the livestock they stole to corrupt ranchers. The Mexican government built forts along the border to try to thwart American outlaws, while Arizona citizens became increasingly agitated. Rustlers, who became known as the cow-boys, began to kill each other as well as innocent citizens. That October, tensions boiled over with Ike and Billy Clanton, Tom and Frank McLaury, and Billy Claiborne confronting the Tombstone marshal, Virgil Earp, and the suddenly deputized Wyatt and Morgan Earp and shotgun-toting Doc Holliday.Bestselling author Tom Clavin peers behind decades of legend surrounding the story of Tombstone to reveal the true story of the drama and violence that made it famous. Tombstone also digs deep into the vendetta ride that followed the tragic gunfight, when Wyatt and Warren Earp and Holliday went vigilante to track down the likes of Johnny Ringo, Curly Bill Brocius, and other cowboys who had cowardly gunned down his brothers. That "vendetta ride" would make the myth of Wyatt Earp complete and punctuate the struggle for power in the American frontier's last boom town.

    

    The political correctness police insist that America is “hated” around the world for being too big, too powerful, too rich, too successful, too loud, too intrusive. And besides, it’s not nice to brag. They are completely missing the point. America’s greatness, America’s exceptional greatness, is not based on that fact that we are the most powerful, most prosperous—and most generous—nation on earth. Rather, those things are the result of American Exceptionalism. To understand American Exceptionalism, as Newt Gingrich passionately argues in A Nation Like No Other, one must understand our unique birth as a nation. American Exceptionalism is found in the simple yet utterly remarkable principles expressed in the Declaration of Independence, “that all men are created equal, that we are endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness.” Our nation is exceptional, continues Newt, because we—unlike any nation before or since—are united by the belief and the promise that no king, no government, no ruling class has the power to infringe upon the rights of the individual. And when such a government attempts to do so, we will vigorously reject them. Sadly, many politicians and leaders today have forgotten our sacred commitment to these ideals. Our government has strayed alarmingly far from the scope of limited powers framed by our Founders. Meanwhile, the liberal media seek out, and sometimes create, stories intended to portray America as a bully and a thief. Even our own president seems clueless, assuring us that yes, yes, he believes in American exceptionalism, just like the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism and the British in British exceptionalism. But American Exceptionalism is not about cheerleading for the home team. It’s about recognizing and honoring the history-making, world-changing ideals our Founding Fathers enshrined to make this a nation of the people, by the people, for the people. And, as Lincoln warned, we must rededicate ourselves to those principles, lest our truly exceptional nation perish from this earth.

    But its very fame has obscured its oddness. Its public image of discovery and triumphant return has veiled its private stories of longing and loss, of self-discovery and mutual ignorances, of good luck and mischance and fortunate misunderstanding." "Rather than concentrate exclusively on the expedition, Brian Hall has chosen to focus on emblematic moments through the whole range of the lives of its participants. Ever present as a backdrop is the violent collision of white and Native American cultures, and the broader tragedy of the inability of any human being to truly understand what lies in the heart of another." Hall has written the novel in four competing voices. The primary one is that of Lewis, the troubled and mercurial figure who found that it was impossible to enter paradise without having it crumble around him. Hall brings this enigmatic character to life as no historian ever has. A second voice is that of the Shoshone girl-captive Sacagawea, interpretor on the expedition, whose short life of disruption and displacement mirrored the times in which she lived. Other perspectives are provided by William Clark and by Toussaint Charbonneau, the French fur trader who took Sacagawea as his wife.

    Carter's unpopularity helped Republicans win seats in the House and gain control over the Senate for the first time in over 20 years. The Reagan Era had begun, ushering in a generation of conservative power. Democrats blamed Carter for this catastrophe and spent the next decade pretending he had never existed. Republicans cheered his demise and trotted out his name to scare voters for years to come. Carter and his wife Rosalynn returned to their farm in the small town of Plains, Georgia. They were humiliated, widely unpopular, and even in financial debt. 35 years later, Carter has become the most celebrated post-president in American history. He has won the Nobel Peace Prize, written bestselling books, and become lauded across the world for his efforts on behalf of peace and social justice. Ex-presidents now adopt the Carter model of leveraging their eminent status to benefit humanity. By pursuing diplomatic missions, leading missions to end poverty and working to eradicate disease around the world, Carter has transformed the idea of what a president can accomplish after leaving the White House.This is the story of how Jimmy Carter lost the biggest political prize on earth--but managed to win back something much greater. Jordan Michael Smith is a contributing writer at Salon and the Christian Science Monitor. His writing has appeared in print or online for the New York Times Magazine, Washington Post, The Atlantic, Slate, BBC, and many other publications. Born in Toronto, he holds a Master's of Arts in Political Science from Carleton University. He lives in New York City. www.jordanmichaelsmith.typepad.com.Cover design by Adil Dara.

    The dream of a railroad across America had at last come true. This book tells the story of swaggering men with big plans, of an America emerging from the Civil War and reaching its manifest destiny. The men who imagined the transcontinental railroad were impassioned profiteers, an unlikely, often ruthless band, guilty of both financial double-dealing and ferocious ingenuity. When ice delayed operations in the Sierra Nevadas, the men of the Central Pacific formed the Summit Ice Company and sold their problem to California saloons. When herds of buffalo ripped up the tracks, the men of the Union Pacific brutally slaughtered tens of thousands of them. (Thus the legend of Buffalo Bill was born.) While his partners finagled in Washington and on Wall Street, Jack Casement, a former Union general, dressed in a fur coat, a Cossack hat, and shining cavalry boots and carrying a pistol and a bullwhip, drove the workers of the Union Pacific to new track-laying records. Meanwhile, from the West, thousands of Chinese immigrants blasted, climbed, and inched their way through the perilous California mountains. The railroad transformed the country forever. It decimated the Plains Indian culture by destroying the herds of buffalo that sustained it. It augmented the timber and steel industries; it opened up the West for commerce. Farms grew up along the length of the rails. Thousands of immigrants from Asia and Europe came here to build the iron road. Most important, it united a nation. The story of the railroad is capitalist theater, starring powerful politicians and generals and con artists. Set in opulent parlor cars, well-heeled boardrooms, and rowdy frontier towns, on desolate plains and deadly gorges, it is a story of vision and corruption, of empire building at its most vulgar and glorious. John Williams combines scholarship with personalities, historical analysis with plain old tall tales, to tell a story that will appeal to readers of American history and adventure and to lovers of the American West. The Transcontinental Railroad is an epic of every sense.

    An authorized biography of the legendary marshal describes the Old West exploits and law enforcement career of Wyatt Earp, his brothers Morgan and Virgil, and Doc Holliday.

    Telling the amazing true story of America's famed explorer, John Charles Fremont, and his beloved supporter and muse, Jessie Benton, it quickly found its way onto the New York Times bestsellers list and adapted into a CBS mini-series starring Richard Chamberlain. Now available for the first time ever in trade paperback, Nevin's epic of adventure and discovery will once again give readers a chance to witness the passion of an early explorers dreams of the great unknown, and the love and perserverance that saw his dream come to life.

    The frontiersmen have become an integral part of our history and folklore, but the Westering experiences of American women are equally central to an accurate picture of what life was like on the frontier.Through the diaries, letters, and reminiscences of women who participated in this migration, Women’s Diaries of the Westward Journey gives us primary source material on the lives of these women, who kept campfires burning with buffalo chips and dried weeds, gave birth to and cared for children along primitive and dangerous roads, drove teams of oxen, picked berries, milked cows, and cooked meals in the middle of a wilderness that was a far cry from the homes they had left back east. Still (and often under the disapproving eyes of their husbands) they found time to write brave letters home or to jot a few weary lines at night into the diaries that continue to enthrall us.In her new foreword, Professor Mary Clearman Blew explores the enduring fascination with this subject among both historians and the general public, and places Schlissel’s groundbreaking work into an intriguing historical and cultural context.

    From its humble beginnings in Canton, Ohio, to its emergence as a sport cherished by millions, all the key moments and famous athletes are honored within the pages of this handsomely produced book. In addition to the lively text, and action and portrait photography, the story of the game and the context in which it grew are animated by original lists, charts, creative statistics, and infographics, along with beautiful photos of the evolving equipment and artifacts essential to the story of the sport. A perfect gift, NFL: 100 Years will be cherished by every football fan, new or old.