Full AspenCat Catalog

Critiques 12 American history textbooks arguing that they contain misinformation, fail to connect present issues with past events, and lack suspense and drama. Retells events in American history to combat these problems.

"In Uncomfortable Conversations With a Black Man, Acho takes on all the questions, large and small, insensitive and taboo, many white Americans are afraid to ask--yet which all Americans need the answers to, now more than ever. With the same open-hearted generosity that has made his video series a phenomenon, Acho explains the vital core of such fraught concepts as white privilege, cultural appropriation, and "reverse racism." In his own words, he...

Many great artists have had at least intermittent doubts about their own abilities. But The Education of Henry Adams is surely one of the few masterpieces to issue directly from a raging inferiority complex. The author, to be sure, had bigger shoes to fill than most of us. Both his grandfather and great-grandfather were U.S. presidents. His father, a relative underachiever, scraped by as a member of Congress and ambassador to the Court of St. James....

In this autobiography, initially published in 1903, Helen Keller recalls her remarkable life as a blind and deaf woman taught to communicate by Ann Sullivan. Here among other memories, Keller describes her epiphany at the water pump when she connected the physical world with its linguistic counterpart. Keller was eventually educated at Radcliffe University, where she graduated with honors.

"Years before the landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling Brown v. Board of Education, Sylvia Mendez, an eight-year-old girl of Mexican and Puerto Rican heritage, played an instrumental role in Mendez v. Westminster, the landmark desegregation case of 1946 in California"--

Examines major issues in education today, including the pros and cons of the Common Core curriculum, the benefits of charter schools, and the effectiveness of standardized testing.

Jessica Lahey explains that because modern parents are at an unprecedented level of over protectiveness, they aren't giving their children the chance to experience failure or the opportunity to solve their own problems. This book lays out a blueprint with advice for handling homework, report cards, social dynamics, and sports, and most importantly, sets forth a plan to help parents learn to step back and embrace their children's setbacks along with...

Waking Up White is the book Irving wishes someone had handed her decades ago. By sharing her sometimes cringe-worthy struggle to understand racism and racial tensions, she offers a fresh perspective on bias, stereotypes, manners, and tolerance. As Irving unpacks her own long-held beliefs about colorblindness, being a good person, and wanting to help people of color, she reveals how each of these well-intentioned mindsets actually perpetuated her ill-conceived...

Wolff presents an engaging, provocative history of American ideas, told through the educations (both in and out of school) of 12 great figures, from Benjamin Franklin to Elvis Presley.

The Insurgents is the inside story of the small group of soldier-scholars, led by General David Petraeus, who plotted to revolutionize one of the largest, oldest, and most hidebound institutions - the United States military. Their aim was to build a new Army that could fight the new kind of war in the post-Cold War age: not massive wars on vast battlefields, but "small wars" in cities and villages, against insurgents and terrorists. These would be...