Full AspenCat Catalog

A history of the bloody massacres that marked--and marred--the settling of the American West in the nineteenth century, and which still provoke immense controversy today. Here are the true stories of the massacres at Sacramento River, Mountain Meadows, Sand Creek, Marias River, Camp Grant, and Wounded Knee, among others. These massacres involved Americans killing Indians, Indians killing Americans, and, in one case, Mormons slaughtering a party of...

Examines America's westward expansion, describing the forcible subjugation of Native American tribes, including the fierce battles against the Navajo which ended with a brutal siege at Canyon de Chelly and "the Long Walk" migration.

Five major historians return to the battlefield to explain the South's defeat. Provocatively argued and engagingly written, this work rejects the notion that the Union victory was inevitable and shows the importance of the commanders, strategies, and victories at key moments.

Battles and massacres are intimate affairs for combatants and others involved, their physical and emotional violence often stemming from fervor and fear. Although mass killing characterizes both battles and massacres, the two are profoundly different. Battles take place between armed forces; massacres are one-sided events in which the dead are mostly innocent victims. Yet the fog of war shrouds both massacres and battles in a functional amnesia. Participants...

Why did the conventional wisdom - that soldiers become increasingly cynical and disillusioned as war progresses - not hold true in the Civil War?. It is to this question - why did they fight - that James M. McPherson, America's preeminent Civil War historian, now turns his attention. He shows that, contrary to what many scholars believe, the soldiers of the Civil War remained powerfully convinced of the ideals for which they fought throughout the...

The gripping story of an epic prairie snowstorm that killed hundreds of newly arrived settlers and cast a shadow on the promise of the American frontier. January 12, 1888, began as an unseasonably warm morning across Nebraska, the Dakotas, and Minnesota, the weather so mild that children walked to school without coats and gloves. But that afternoon, without warning, the atmosphere suddenly, violently changed. One moment the air was calm; the next...

An account of the ecological and historical impact of a series of Mississippi River Valley earthquakes in 1811 and 1812 documents how towns were destroyed and political loyalties were altered, changing the course of the War of 1812.