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Books > Biography > Historical, political & military
A "New York Times "bestseller, Jeff Guinn's definitive,
myth-busting account of the most famous gunfight in American
history reveals who Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, and the Clantons and
McLaurys really were and what the shootout was all about.
On the afternoon of October 26, 1881, in a vacant lot in Tombstone,
Arizona, a confrontation between eight armed men erupted in a
deadly shootout. 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
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Bruno
(Hardcover)
Jacob Abbott
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R469
Discovery Miles 4 690
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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The definitive account of an icon who shaped gender equality for
all women. In this comprehensive, revelatory biography - fifteen
years of interviews and research in the making - historian Jane
Sherron De Hart explores the central experiences that crucially
shaped Ginsburg's passion for justice, her advocacy for gender
equality, and her meticulous jurisprudence. At the heart of her
story and abiding beliefs was her Jewish background, specifically
the concept of tikkun olam, the Hebrew injunction to 'repair the
world', with its profound meaning for a young girl who grew up
during the Holocaust and World War II. Ruth's journey began with
her mother, who died tragically young but whose intellect inspired
her daughter's feminism. It stretches from Ruth's days as a baton
twirler at Brooklyn's James Madison High School to Cornell
University to Harvard and Columbia Law Schools; to becoming one of
the first female law professors in the country and having to fight
for equal pay and hide her second pregnancy to avoid losing her
job; to becoming the director of the ACLU's Women's Rights Project
and arguing momentous anti-sex-discrimination cases before the US
Supreme Court. All this, even before being nominated in 1993 to
become the second woman on the Court, where her crucial decisions
and dissents are still making history. Intimately, personably told,
this biography offers unprecedented insight into a pioneering life
and legal career whose profound impact will reverberate deep into
the twenty-first century and beyond.
The battlefield reputation of Confederate general Nathan Bedford
Forrest, long recognized as a formidable warrior, has been shaped
by one infamous wartime incident. At Fort Pillow in 1864, the
attack by Confederate forces under Forrest's command left many of
the Tennessee Unionists and black soldiers garrisoned there dead in
a confrontation widely labeled as a "massacre." In "The River Was
Dyed with Blood," best-selling Forrest biographer Brian Steel Wills
argues that although atrocities did occur after the fall of the
fort, Forrest did not order or intend a systematic execution of its
defenders. Rather, the general's great failing was losing control
of his troops.
A prewar slave trader and owner, Forrest was a controversial
figure throughout his lifetime. Because the attack on Fort
Pillow--which, as Forrest wrote, left the nearby waters "dyed with
blood"--occurred in an election year, Republicans used him as a
convenient Confederate scapegoat to marshal support for the war.
After the war he also became closely associated with the spread of
the Ku Klux Klan. Consequently, the man himself, and the truth
about Fort Pillow, has remained buried beneath myths, legends,
popular depictions, and disputes about the events themselves.
Wills sets what took place at Fort Pillow in the context of
other wartime excesses from the American Revolution to World War II
and Vietnam, as well as the cultural transformations brought on by
the Civil War. Confederates viewed black Union soldiers as the
embodiment of slave rebellion and reacted accordingly.
Nevertheless, Wills concludes that the engagement was neither a
massacre carried out deliberately by Forrest, as charged by a
congressional committee, nor solely a northern fabrication meant to
discredit him and the Confederate States of America, as
pro-Southern apologists have suggested. The battle-scarred fighter
with his homespun aphorisms was neither an infallible warrior nor a
heartless butcher, but a product of his time and his heritage.
Emma Goldman is one of the most celebrated activists and
philosophers of the early 20th century, admired and reviled for her
anarchist ideas and vociferous support of free speech and personal
liberation. A polarizing figure in life, Emma Goldman was among the
first advocates of birth control for women. From 1900 to 1920 she
was in and out of jail in the United States on charges of illegally
promoting contraception, inciting riots in favor of her social and
economic causes, and discouraging potential recruits to avoid the
draft for World War I. Although Goldman initially supported the
Bolshevik Revolution, the resulting Soviet Union's repressiveness
caused an abrupt reversal in her opinion. Goldman's narrative is
thorough yet compelling; her childhood in Russia, her emigration to
the USA as a teenager, and her attraction to anarchist and social
causes is told.
The long career of a great soldier
This is the autobiography of Smith-Dorrien, one of the most notable
British military figures of the mid-Victorian and Edwardian ages.
The author's first experiences of military life were nearly his
last and in this book we are given a vital and chilling account of
what it was to be one of the few surviving officers to flee from
the Zulu impis at Isandlwhana. Interesting service in Egypt, the
Sudan, and the Boer War follows as Smith-Dorrien's career develops
and he becomes a talented and highly regarded staff officer. His
works during the opening campaigns of the Great War are now
properly regarded as superb generalship which probably saved the
army, but it also earned the enmity of French, his superior, who
all but ended his career. A brilliant autobiography by a fine
soldier who every reader will come to admire as a military man and
a person with each turn of the page.
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Noble Rider
(Hardcover)
S Bret Breneman
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R902
R760
Discovery Miles 7 600
Save R142 (16%)
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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