Full AspenCat Catalog

From the Publisher: In this unique re-creation of one of the most dramatic periods in modern American history, Studs Terkel recaptures the Great Depression of the 1930s in all its complexity. The book is a mosaic of memories from those who were richest to those who were most destitute: politicians like James Farley and Raymond Moley; businessmen like Bill Benton and Clement Stone; a six-day bicycle racer; artists and writers; racketeers; speakeasy...

Follows the fates of five interrelated families--American, German, Russian, English, and Welsh--as they move through the dramas of the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and the struggle for women's suffrage.

"Lynn Dumenil brings a fresh interpretation to a dramatic, important, and misunderstood decade. As her lively work makes clear, changing values brought an end to the repressive Victorian era; urban liberalism emerged; the federal bureaucracy was expanded; pluralism became increasingly important to America's heterogeneous society; and different religious, ethnic, and cultural groups encountered the homogenizing force of a powerful mass-consumer culture."--Book...

A comprehensive look at the decade that was shaped by the automobile, electricity, immigration, and World War I, through the eyes and ears of everyday Americans.

Shlaes offers a reinterpretation of the Great Depression, seeking to demonstrate how the failures of Hoover and Roosevelt to understand the prosperity of the 1920s directly contributed to massive national burdens that marginalized common citizens.

This Is Who We Were: In The 1920s is an offspring of our 13-volume Working Americans series. This new title is devoted to one decade -- the 1920s. It represents all classes, dozens of occupations, and all regions of the country. This comprehensive look at the decade when consumerism, new freedoms for women, new inventions, and shifting social ethics were introduced presents American history through the eyes and ears of everyday Americans, not the...

"The Great Crash of 1929 profoundly disrupted the United States' confident march toward becoming the world's superpower. The breakneck growth of 1920s America--with its boom in automobiles, electricity, credit lines, radio, and movies--certainly presaged a serious recession by the decade's end, but not a depression. The totality of the collapse shocked the nation, and its duration scarred generations to come. In this lucid and fast-paced account...

From the publisher. Mr. Smiley explains the roots of the depression in the 1920s, the New Deal's attempts to combat the economic crisis, and the legacy of these efforts in World War II and the postwar years.

Soul of a People is about a handful of people who were on the Federal Writer's Project in the 1930s and a glimpse of America at a turning point. This particular handful of characters went from poverty to great things later, and included John Cheever, Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, and Studs Terkel. In the 1930s they were all caught up in an effort to describe America in a series of WPA guides. Through striking images and firsthand...

Autumn 1939. In Paris, American motion picture actor Frederic Stahl is drawn into a clandestine world of foreign correspondents, exiled Spanish Republicans, and spies of every sort. As a celebrity from neutral America -- who can travel across the continent freely -- Stahl could be very useful indeed. Arriving in Paris on the eve of the Munich Appeasement in 1938, Hollywood star Frederic Stahl is unwittingly entangled in the region's shifting political...