Full AspenCat Catalog

Anderson Cooper chronicles the rise and fall of a legendary American dynasty--his mother's family--the Vanderbilts. Drawing on never-before-seen documents and told from a unique insider's viewpoint, the CNN anchor tells the story of his legendary family and their remarkable influence.

Cokie Roberts sheds new light on the generation of heroines, reformers, and visionaries who helped shape our nation with this blend of biographical portraits and behind-the-scenes vignettes chronicling women's public roles and private responsibilities. Drawing on personal correspondence, private journals, and other primary sources--many of them previously unpublished--Roberts brings to life the extraordinary accomplishments of women who laid the groundwork...

"In 1848, a year of international democratic revolt, a young, enslaved couple, Ellen and William Craft, achieved one of the boldest feats of self-emancipation in American history. Posing as master and slave, while sustained by their love as husband and wife, they made their escape together across more than 1,000 miles, riding out in the open on steamboats, carriages, and trains that took them from bondage in Georgia to the free states of the North....

Discusses the events leading to the civil war, from the South Carolina secession convention to the fighting at Fort Sumter.

Major Powell wrote this account of his 1869 expedition, and his narrative is one of the great clascis of exploration, as thrilling as the feat itself.

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning scholar, a timely history of the constitutional changes that built equality into the nation's foundation and how those guarantees have been shaken over time. The Declaration of Independence announced equality as an American ideal, but it took the Civil War and the subsequent adoption of three constitutional amendments to establish that ideal as American law. The Reconstruction amendments abolished slavery, guaranteed...

Thomas Jefferson fathered three girls: two white and free, one black and a slave. This book about Martha, Maria, and Harriet tells the fascinating story of their very different lives at Monticello and beyond, as daughters of one of our most brilliant and complicated Founding Fathers

"A profound new rendering of the struggle by African-Americans for equality after the Civil War and the violent counter-revolution that resubjugated them, as seen through the prism of the war of images and ideas that have left an enduring racist stain on the American mind. The abolition of slavery in the aftermath of the Civil War is a familiar story, as is the civil rights revolution that transformed the nation after World War II. But the century...