Full AspenCat Catalog

In the summer of 1905, President Roosevelt dispatched the largest diplomatic mission in American history. Led by Secretary of War William Howard Taft, the group traveled thousands of miles across the Pacific, docking in Hawaii, Japan, the Phillipines, China, and Korea. Along for the ride was Teddy's daughter Alice, a media darling known for her wild behavior. She was not there by accident: her father knew that Alice would be an effective distraction...

A top historian offers a compelling history of perhaps the most remarkable holiday season in 20th-century history--December 1941--a Christmas season that played out in the shadows of the Pearl Harbor attack and the start of America's involvement in World War II. Christmas 1941 came little more than two weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor. The shock--in some cases overseas, elation--was worldwide. While Americans attempted to go about celebrating...

"Central Europe has long been infamous as a region beset by war, a place where, historically, empires clashed and sieges from the east toppled kingdoms and enslaved peoples. Many view the region-comprising present-day Germany, Poland, Hungary, Austria, Slovenia, and Romania, among other countries--as united only by the shared experience of invasions launched by foreign powers, from the Huns of the fourth century, to the Swedes of the seventeenth,...

"A Pulitzer Prize-winning historian's provocative reinterpretation of the eight decades surrounding the Civil War (and leading into the twentieth century); the next volume in the Penguin History of the United States, edited by Eric Foner. In this ambitious story of American imperial conquest and capitalist development, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Steven Hahn takes on the conventional histories of the nineteenth century and offers a perspective...

From Pulitzer-winning social historian Kluger comes a reinterpretation of American history, a sweeping chronicle of how Americans extended their sovereignty from the Atlantic coastline to the mid-Pacific in the first 125 years of their national existence. The story reveals great accomplishments along with the American tendency to confuse success with heaven-sent entitlement. The nation's pioneer generations were blessed with remarkable energy, fortitude,...

The Pan-American Highway, monument to a centurys worth of diplomacy and investment, education and engineering, scandal and sweat, is the longest road in the world, passable everywhere save the mythic Darien Gap that straddles Panama and Colombia. The highways history, however, has long remained a mystery, a story scattered among government archives, private papers, and fading memories. In contrast to the Panama Canal and its vast literature, the Pan-American...

Long before Thomas Jefferson confronted the Barbary Pirates, Queen Elizabeth sent a secret message to the Ottoman Sultan Murad II, inviting him to open his markets to her merchants and to embark on a pathbreaking new alliance. Islam and the West crossed paths much earlier than we think-and originally the Muslims had the upper hand. When Elizabeth was excommunicated by the pope in 1570, she found herself in an awkward predicament. England had always...

From the New York Times bestselling author of Washington's Spies, the thrilling story of the Confederate spy who came to Britain to turn the tide of the Civil War—and the Union agent resolved to stop him. In 1861, soon after the outbreak of the Civil War, two secret agents—one a Confederate, the other his Union rival—were dispatched to neutral Britain, each entrusted with a vital mission. The South's James Bulloch, charming and devious, was...

1,000 MILES BEHIND THE IRON CURTAIN, HE STOOD FOR FREEDOM Ronald Reagans dramatic battle to win the Cold War, revealed as never before by the #1 bestselling author and award-winning anchor of the #1 rated Special Report with Bret Baier. In his acclaimed bestseller Three Days in January, Bret Baier illuminated the extraordinary leadership of President Dwight Eisenhower at the dawn of the Cold War. Now in his highly anticipated new history, Three...

"For more than forty years, the United States has reached out to China, helping it develop a booming economy and take its place on the world stage, in the belief that there is little to fear--and everything to gain--from China's rise. But what if the Chinese have had a different plan all along? The Hundred-Year Marathon reveals China's secret strategy to supplant the United States as the world's dominant power, and to do so by 2049, the one hundredth...