Full AspenCat Catalog

Now printed from the manuscript as Franklin wrote it, and including his preliminary outline; with an introduction by Carl Van Doren and drawings by William Sharp. A limited edition, bound in genuine leather. Shelved in the "Classics" section.

Benjamin Franklin is the Founding Father who winks at us. An ambitious urban entrepreneur who rose up the social ladder, from leather-aproned shopkeeper to dining with kings, he seems made of flesh rather than of marble. In bestselling author Walter Isaacson's vivid and witty full-scale biography, we discover why Franklin seems to turn to us from history's stage with eyes that twinkle from behind his new-fangled spectacles. By bringing Franklin to...

James Madison is remembered primarily as a systematic political theorist, but this bookish and unassuming man was also a practical politician who strove for balance in an age of revolution. In this biography, Jeff Broadwater focuses on Madison's role in the battle for religious freedom in Virginia, his contributions to the adoption of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, his place in the evolution of the party system, his relationship with Dolley...

"In his epic new book, Russell Shorto takes us back to the founding of the American nation, drawing on diaries, letters and autobiographies to flesh out six lives that cast the era in a fresh new light. They include an African man who freed himself and his family from slavery, a rebellious young woman who abandoned her abusive husband to chart her own course, and a certain Mr. Washington, who was admired for his social graces but harshly criticized...

Presents a comprehensive essay on United States history from European colonization through the 1960s.

"Notes on the State of Virginia" is the only full-length book by Thomas Jefferson published during his lifetime. Jefferson first published the book anonymously in a private and limited-edition printing in Paris in 1785 while he was serving as a trade representative for the new American government. "Notes on the State of Virginia" was later made available to the general public in a 1787 printing in London by John Stockdale. Jefferson's detailed description...

" A major intellectual history of the American Revolution and its influence on later revolutions in Europe and the Americas, the Expanding Blaze is a sweeping history of how the American Revolution inspired revolutions throughout Europe and the Atlantic world in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Jonathan Israel, one of the world's leading historians of the Enlightenment, shows how the radical ideas of American founders such as Paine, Jefferson,...

The battle of Cowpens was a crucial turning point in the Revolutionary War in the South and stands as perhaps the finest American tactical demonstration of the entire war. On 17 January 1781, Daniel Morgan's force of Continental troops and militia routed British regulars and Loyalists under the command of Banastre Tarleton. The victory at Cowpens helped put the British army on the road to the Yorktown surrender and, ultimately, cleared the way for...

This is the first book dealing with any period in American history which attempts to describe and analyze national politics through studying voting patterns in state legislatures. During the 1780s two relatively stable legislative parties" emerged in every state, and each state possessed common characteristics. Main labels these parties "localists" and "cosmopolitans" and show how such issues as funding of debts, paper money, and land prices provided...

Following the end of the American Revolutionary War (but prior to the establishment of the US Constitution) three of the Founding Fathers - Alexander Hamilton, John Jay and James Madison - prepared 85 articles in support of ratifying the Constitution and published them under the collective pseudonym "Publius" to try and rouse the public's support for ratification. The first seventy-seven of these essays were published between October 1787 and...