Fifty years ago, David Wedd was a young army officer in West Africas Gold Coast, when that country became Ghana, the first black African colony to gain independence from British rule. In an account that is by turns exciting, funny and poignant, he depicts the changeover from the inside. His lively portrait of the emerging nation introduces us to a whole gallery of characters: the European and African soldiers in his Battalion; traders and market women; religious leaders and witch-doctors; sportsmen, teachers and musicians; and political leaders, including Ghanas first Prime Minister, Kwame Nkrumah. He tells of his work as an intelligence officer in the new nation and his exploration of the rain forest with its exotic scenery and wildlife, and he shares with us his journey north, through Burkina Faso and Mali to the Sahara Desert and the old town of Timbuktu. Throughout these pages his love of West Africa, with its varied landscapes and above all its exuberant people, is inescapable.

Most people equate Los Angeles with smog, sprawl, forty suburbs in search of a city-the great "what-not-to-do" of twentieth-century city building. But there's much more to LA's story than this shallow stereotype. History shows that Los Angeles was intensely, ubiquitously planned. The consequences of that planning-the environmental history of urbanism—is one place to turn for the more complex lessons LA has to offer. Working forward from ancient times and ancient ecologies to the very recent past, Land of Sunshine is a fascinating exploration of the environmental history of greater Los Angeles. Rather than rehearsing a litany of errors or insults against nature, rather than decrying the lost opportunities of "roads not taken," these essays, by nineteen leading geologists, ecologists, and historians, instead consider the changing dynamics both of the city and of nature. In the nineteenth century, for example, "density" was considered an evil, and reformers struggled mightily to move the working poor out to areas where better sanitation and flowers and parks "made life seem worth the living." We now call that vision "sprawl," and we struggle just as much to bring middle-class people back into the core of American cities. There's nothing natural, or inevitable, about such turns of events. It's only by paying very close attention to the ways metropolitan nature has been constructed and construed that meaningful lessons can be drawn. History matters. So here are the plants and animals of the Los Angeles basin, its rivers and watersheds. Here are the landscapes of fact and fantasy, the historical actors, events, and circumstances that have proved transformative over and over again. The result is a nuanced and rich portrait of Los Angeles that will serve planners, communities, and environmentalists as they look to the past for clues, if not blueprints, for enhancing the quality and viability of cities.

Florida is a story of astonishing growth, a state swelling from 500,000 residents at the outset of the 20th century to some 16 million at the end. As recently as mid-century, on the eve of Pearl Harbor, Florida was the smallest state in the South. At the dawn of the millennium, it is the fourth largest in the country, a megastate that was among those introducing new words into the American vernacular: space coast, climate control, growth management, retirement community, theme park, edge cities, shopping mall, boomburbs, beach renourishment, Interstate, and Internet. Land of Sunshine, State of Dreams attempts to understand the firestorm of change that erupted into modern Florida by examining the great social, cultural, and economic forces driving its transformation. Gary Mormino ranges far and wide across the landscape and boundaries of a place that is at once America's southernmost state and the northernmost outpost of the Caribbean. From the capital, Tallahassee--a day's walk from the Georgia border--to Miami--a city distant but tantalizingly close to Cuba and Haiti--Mormino traces the themes of Florida's transformation: the echoes of old Dixie and a vanishing Florida; land booms and tourist empires; revolutions in agriculture, technology, and demographics; the seductions of the beach and the dynamics of a graying population; and the enduring but changing meanings of a dreamstate. Beneath the iconography of popular culture is revealed a complex and complicated social framework that reflects a dizzying passage from New Spain to Old South, New South to Sunbelt.

You will not read this story of Dave and Nick anywhere else. Ann Treneman, the sketchwriter for The Times, chronicles all the highlights (and even more of the lowlights) of their extraordinary relationship in a love story that not even Mills & Boon could imagine. Two posh boys who found each other, a bromance to remember, full of love, hate, fratricide, war, riots, bad hair and even worse speeches, not to mention that sexy AV referendum. Through her perceptive sketches, Ann Treneman tells the story of how they dated, flirted with others (including the brooding hulkish Gordon), but eventually came together in a sun-kissed wedding in the Downing Street rose garden. She reveals how Nick struggled to be the perfect political wife while starting a new sub-career as a national hate figure, and chronicles Dave's long and bruising battle with arrogance. She tells the shocking story of their arch rival, the man who killed his brother and got away with it. The nightmare of the grandparents, the mad aunts and uncles, the ambitious kids and the economy that simply would not do as it was told. This is the tale of two men and a screaming baby of a coalition, trying to stay true to each other when surrounded by political mayhem and madness. Laugh? Or cry (with laughter)? How about both?

Includes reports, etc., of the Southwest Society of the Archaeological Institutes of America.

Offers a comprehensive look at the history of the state of Florida, from its discovery, exploration, and settlement through its becoming a state, to notable events in the early twenty-first century.

The history of medicine is much more than the story of doctors, nurses, and hospitals. Seeking to understand the patient's perspective, historians scour the archives, searching for rare personal accounts. Bringing together a trove of more than 400 family letters by Charles Dwight Willard, Suffering in the Land of Sunshine provides a unique window into the experience of sickness. A Los Angeles civic leader at the turn of the twentieth century, Willard is well known to historians of the West, but exclusively for his public life as a booster and reformer. Willard's evocative story offers fresh insights into several critical issues, including how concepts of gender, class, and race shape patients' representations of their illness, how expectations of cure affect the illness experience, how different cultures constrain the coping strategies of the sick, and why robust health is such an exalted value in certain societies.