Full AspenCat Catalog

Born in 1831, Isabella Bird, daughter of a clergyman, set off alone to the Antipodes in 1872 'in search of health' and found she had embarked on a life of adventurous travel.

A narrative account of the twentieth president's political career offers insight into his background as a scholar and Civil War hero, his battles against the corrupt establishment, and Alexander Graham Bell's failed attempt to save him from an assassin's bullet.

"The definitive, dramatic biography of the most important African-American of the nineteenth century: Frederick Douglass, the escaped slave who became the greatest orator of his day and one of the leading abolitionists and writers of the era. As a young man Frederick Douglass (1818-1895) escaped from slavery in Baltimore, Maryland. He was fortunate to have been taught to read by his slave owner mistress, and he would go on to become one of the major...

The near extinction of the buffalo herds of the Great Plains in the nineteenth century was the product of several factors, including the greed of buffalo hunters, the callousness of "sportsmen," and the desire of the federal government to deprive the Plains Indians of their food source. But the buffalo did (barely) survive, and one of their unlikely saviors was Grinnell, a Brooklyn-born, Yale-educated anthropologist and naturalist. Grinnell was entranced...

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

"The thrilling true story of the Dalton Gang and the most brazen heist in history, by the multiple New York Times bestselling author. The Last Outlaws is the thrilling true story of the last of the great gang of outlaws. The Dalton Gang consisted of fourbrothers and their rotating cast of accomplices who saw themselves as descended from the legendary James Gang. They soon became legends themselves, beginning their career as common horse thieves, before...

Features stories of 26 of Colorado's most flamboyant outlaws and lawmen.

In 1927, Zora Neale Hurston went to Plateau, Alabama, just outside Mobile, to interview eighty-six-year-old Cudjo Lewis. Of the millions of men, women, and children transported from Africa to America as slaves, Cudjo was then the only person alive to tell the story of this integral part of the nations history. Hurston was there to record Cudjos firsthand account of the raid that led to his capture and bondage fifty years after the Atlantic slave trade...

In 1819, the 238-ton Essex set sail from Nantucket on a routine voyage to hunt whales. Fifteen months later the Essex was rammed and sunk by an enraged sperm whale. Fearing cannibals on the islands to the west, the 20-man crew set out in three small boats for South America, almost 3,000 miles away. Three months later, only eight were left alive. This book shares a fantastic saga of survival and adventure, steeped in the lore of the whaling tradition,...

Mark Twain's works are a living national treasury, yet somehow, beneath the vast river of literature that he left behind, Samuel Langhorne Clemens, the man who became Mark Twain, has receded from view, leaving us with only faint and often trivialized remnants of his towering personality. Here, author Powers recreates the 19th century's vital landscapes and tumultuous events while restoring the human being at their center. Clemens left his frontier...