Full AspenCat Catalog

In "Founding Mothers," Roberts tells the fascinating yet overlooked story of the women who helped create a new nation. While the men were debating the merits of revolution, these women were living it even as the Redcoats landed on their doorsteps.

A riveting history of the men and women whose discoveries and inventions at the end of the eighteenth century gave birth to the Romantic Age of Science. THE AGE OF WONDER investigates the earliest ideas of deep time and space and the explorers of "dynamic science," of an infinite, mysterious Nature waiting to be discovered. Three lives dominate the book: William Herschel and his sister Caroline, whose dedication to the study of the stars forever changed...

In 1733, struggling printer John Peter Zenger scandalized colonial New York by launching the New-York Weekly Journal, which assailed the British governor as corrupt and arrogant -- a direct challenge to the prevailing law against "seditious libel", which criminalized any criticism of the government. Fronting for a group of powerful antiroyalist politicians, Zenger was jailed for nine months before his landmark trial in August 1735, when he was brilliantly...

Part high-seas adventure, part examination of the Age of Exploration, this account of Captain James Cook's last voyage in 1776 charts how his overt and covert missions came to a head on the island of Hawaii and left behind a complex and controversial legacy still debated to this day.

The Inside Passage from Puget Sound to Alaska is winding, turbulent, and deep--an ancient, thousand-mile-long sea route, rich in dangerous whirlpools, eddies, rips, and races. Here flourished the canoe culture of the Northwest Indians, with their fantastic painted masks and complex iconography and their stories of malign submarine gods and monsters. The unhappy British ship Discovery, captained by George Vancouver, came through these open reaches...