Full AspenCat Catalog

Seduced by her employer's son, Evangeline, a naïve young governess in early nineteenth-century London, is discharged when her pregnancy is discovered and sent to the notorious Newgate Prison. After months in the fetid, overcrowded jail, she learns she is sentenced to "the land beyond the seas," Van Diemen's Land, a penal colony in Australia. Though uncertain of what awaits, Evangeline knows one thing: the child she carries will be born on the months-long...

A stunning behind-the-curtain look into the last years of the illegal transatlantic slave trade in the United States. Long after the transatlantic slave trade was officially outlawed in the early nineteenth century by every major slave trading nation, merchants based in the United States were still sending hundreds of illegal slave ships from American ports to the African coast. The key instigators were slave traders who moved to New York City after...

We think of the Stephensons and Brunel as the fathers of the railways, and their Liverpool and Manchester and Great Western Railways as the prototypes of the modern systems. But who were the railways' grandfathers and great grandfathers? For the rapid evolution of the railways after 1830 depended to a considerable degree upon the Stephensons, Brunel and their contemporaries being able to draw upon centuries of experience of using and developing railways,...

"Reconstructing the South studies the aftermath of the Civil War, discusses how racist laws kept former slaves in inferior positions compared with whites, and explores how the actions of people in the mid-1800s continue to impact African Americans today."--

Set against the backdrop of the race to exploit Africa by the colonial powers, a story of courage and adventure brings to life the rivalry between two enemies--a decorated soldier, and a young aristocrat and Army officer--as they set out to find the mysterious headwaters of the Nile River.

For nearly a century, Victorian London relied on "climbing boys" - orphans owned by chimney sweeps - to clean flues and protect homes from fire. The work was hard, thankless, and dangerous. Eleven-year-old Nan Sparrow is quite possibly the best climber who ever lived, and a girl. With her wits and will, she's managed to beat the deadly odds time and time again. But when Nan gets stuck in a deadly chimney fire, she fears her time has come. Instead,...

March 1848. Mysterious knocks are heard in a little house in rural New York, throwing the community into turmoil. Are the children who live there -- Kate and Maggie Fox, sisters aged eleven and fourteen -- making the raps to trick their parents? Or are the girls mediums for otherworldly messages? From a battery of strange sounds and the excitement they create, modern Spiritualism is born. Talking to the Dead: Kate and Maggie Fox and the Rise of Spiritualism...

In the first comprehensive study of the experience of Virginia soldiers and their families in the Civil War, Aaron Sheehan-Dean captures the inner world of the rank-and-file. He challenges earlier arguments that middle- and lower-class southerners gradually withdrew their support for the Confederacy because their class interests were not being met. Instead he argues that Virginia soldiers continued to be motivated by the profound emotional connection...

The Petersburg campaign began June 15, 1864, with Union attempts to break an improvised line of Confederate field fortifications. By the time the campaign ended on April 2, 1865, two opposing lines of sophisticated and complex earthworks stretched for thirty-five miles, covering not only Petersburg but also the southeastern approaches to Richmond. This book, the third volume in Earl Hess's trilogy on the war in the eastern theater, recounts the strategic...

"One look at Baby Doe and you know she was meant to be a legend! She was just twenty years old when she came to Colorado to work a gold mine with her new husband. Little did she expect that she’d be abandoned and pregnant and left to manage the gold mine alone. But that didn’t stop her! She moved to Leadville and fell in love with a married prospector, twice her age. Horace Tabor struck the biggest silver vein in history, divorced his wife and...