Full AspenCat Catalog

It's 1793, and there's an invisible killer roaming the streets of Philadelphia. The city's residents are fleeing in fear. This killer has a name -- yellow fever -- but everything else about it is a mystery. Its cause is unknown, and there is no cure. This powerful, dramatic account by award-winning author Jim Murphy traces the devastating course of the epidemic. The medical beliefs and practices of the time and the conditions that helped the disease...

When winsome socialite Mia Stanley insists on researching downtrodden seaman's wives on the docks of Philadelphia for the magazine she works for, she uncovers a scheme that puts her own life in danger.

Placing sexual culture at the center of power relations in Revolutionary-era Philadelphia, Clare A. Lyons uncovers a world where runaway wives challenged their husbands' patriarchal rights and where serial and casual sexual relationships were commonplace. By reading popular representations of sex against actual behavior, Lyons reveals the clash of meanings given to sex and illuminates struggles to recast sexuality in order to eliminate its subversive...

Describes the conditions of African Americans in the North and the South during and immediately after the Civil War.

Philadelphia, the late 1870s. A city of gas lamps, cobblestone streets, and horse-drawn carriages and home to the controversial surgeon Dr. Spencer Black. The son of a grave robber, young Dr. Black studies at Philadelphia's esteemed Academy of Medicine, where he develops an unconventional hypothesis: What if the world's most celebrated mythological beasts, mermaids, minotaurs, and satyrs, were in fact the evolutionary ancestors of humankind? The...

"William Still was one of the main leaders of the Underground Railroad. Based in Philadelphia, Still built a reputation as a courageous abolitionist, writer, philanthropist, and guide for fugitive slaves. Throughout the 1840s and 1850s, Still assisted the Railroad and helped nearly a thousand slaves escape from the South to the North and Canada. Still worked personally with Harriet Tubman, assisted the family of John Brown and helped Brown's associates...

In 1923, fifteen-year-old Hattie Shepherd flees Georgia and settles in Philadelphia, hoping for a chance at a better life. Instead, she marries a man who will bring her nothing but disappointment and watches helplessly as her firstborn twins succumb to an illness a few pennies could have prevented. Hattie gives birth to nine more children whom she raises with grit and mettle and not an ounce of the tenderness they crave. She vows to prepare them for...

As a cop, Ron Previte was corrupt. As a mobster he was brutal. And in his final role, as a confidential informant to the FBI, Previte was deadly. The Last Gangster is his story-the story of the last days of the Philadelphia Mob, and of the clash of generations that brought it down once and for all. For thirty-five years, Ron Previte roamed the underworld. A six-foot, three-hundred-pound capo in the Philadelphia-South Jersey crime family, he ran every...

"Billy Franklin discovers a love of learning and books through the Leather Apron Club library, run by his father, the famous Benjamin Franklin."--