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47,382 public-domain books, summarised. Page 164 of 988.
The Chaldean account of Genesis
George Smith
Long before Hebrew scribes set pen to parchment, ancient Mesopotamians pressed tales of world-shattering floods, primordial chaos, and hubristic towers into raw clay tablets.
The music of the spheres
Florence Armstrong Grondal
Ancient myths and modern astrophysics converge across the night sky, transforming the static dome of stars into a living theater of legend, physical law, and cosmic history.
The Rāmāyana, Volume 1. Bālakāndam and Ayodhyākāndam
Valmiki
A righteous prince is exiled on the eve of his coronation to fulfill an old promise, trading his crown for a forest life while his family and kingdom fracture in his absence.
The Tempest
William Shakespeare
A exiled duke uses tempestuous magic to draw his betrayers to an enchanted island, orchestrating a series of reckonings, illusions, and unexpected romances to reclaim his lost title.
A Comprehensive History of Norwich
A. D. Bayne
A dense, vibrant urban portrait reveals how a singular East Anglian city grew from an ancient Celtic settlement into a powerhouse of medieval industry, religious zeal, and modern civic ambition.
Botany: The Science of Plant Life
Norman Taylor
A clear-eyed journey into the hidden mechanics of the plant world reveals how vegetation feeds, moves, reproduces, and shapes the planet.
Hania
Henryk Sienkiewicz
Youthful passion, bitter rivalry, and tragic misunderstanding collide against the backdrop of nineteenth-century Polish estate life, where an idealistic young noble loses the woman he loves to his charismatic Tartar friend.
Monarchs of minstrelsy, from "Daddy" Rice to date
Edw. Le Roy (Edward Le Roy) Rice
An exhaustive biographical encyclopedia of American blackface minstrelsy, this 1911 reference work documents hundreds of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century performers, troupes, and theatrical innovations through concise, data-rich entries.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Nathaniel Hawthorne
A quiet reckoning with human frailty, these classic short stories measure the weight of pride, secret guilt, and the elusive nature of perfection.
Primitive & Mediaeval Japanese Texts: Transliterated into Roman with introductions, notes and glossaries
Unknown
A early-Japanese textual voyage through ancient imperial long-lays, folk tales, courtly prefaces, and drama.
Shorter novels, vol. 3
Samuel Johnson
Restless souls abandon secure palaces and ordinary duties to chase forbidden knowledge and ideal happiness, only to discover that the human heart carries its own torment wherever it wanders.
The complete servant: Being a practical guide to the peculiar duties and business of all descriptions of servants, from the housekeeper to the servant of all-work, and from the land steward to the foot-boy. With useful receipts and tables
Adams, Samuel, servant
An exhaustive 1825 manual of domestic economy written by two retired servants, offering a remarkably detailed blueprint for managing every post in a Georgian household.
The Girl with the Golden Eyes
Honoré de Balzac
In the feverish shadows of 1830s Paris, a jaded aristocrat pursues a mysterious beauty, only to uncover a dangerous web of captivity, secret identities, and fatal jealousy.
The History of Korea (vol. 1 of 2)
Homer B. (Homer Bezaleel) Hulbert
A nation's history unfolds through shifting borders, court intrigues, and foreign invasions across millennia of survival.
The Majesty of Calmness
William George Jordan
True peace is not the absence of trouble, but the absolute, quiet readiness to face it. Serenity is a muscle built through self-reliance, steady growth, and the deliberate rejection of modern rushing.
The Parasite: A Story
Arthur Conan Doyle
An ambitious academic succumbs to hypnotic fascination, surrendering his mind to a vengeful woman who uses mesmerism to systematically dismantle his career, relationships, and sanity.
Travels Through North America, During the Years 1825 and 1826. v. 1-2
Duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach Bernhard
A high-ranking German aristocrat tours a young United States, examining its emerging institutions, raw wilderness, and complex social systems with the cool precision of a military officer and the keen curiosity of an enlightened observer.
Vidyāpati: Bangīya padābali
Vidyāpati Thākura
Love is a fire that consumes the self to reveal the divine within.
Wit and its relation to the unconscious
Sigmund Freud
Unconscious impulses find an unexpected outlet through joke-making, transforming hidden tensions into shared delight.
Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White
Andrew Dickson White
A life spent navigating the clash between tradition and progress yields a remarkable view of a rapidly transforming modern world.
Highways and Byways in London
Emily Constance Baird Cook
The great, noisy, living city stretches out before the reader, revealed not through dry statistics but through a warm-hearted wanderer’s deliberate, sharp-eyed strolls down crowded thoroughfares and forgotten alleys.
Kim
Rudyard Kipling
A homeless Irish-English orphan boy navigates the vibrant, sprawling roads of British-ruled India, caught between the mystical quest of a Tibetan monk and the deadly shadow-games of imperial espionage.
Merrie England in the Olden Time, Vol. 2
George Daniel
Through tavern songs, fairground antics, and historical anecdotes, a vibrant panorama of traditional English revelry comes to life, set against the encroaching march of modern sobriety.
Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood: Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter
J. Conway (James Conway) Walter
A rich, decades-long survey of a Lincolnshire spa town, this historical guide unearths everything from ancient Roman fortifications and Cistercian ruins to lost birds of prey and local dialect.
The Biography of a Prairie Girl
Eleanor Gates
A blizzard rages across the Dakota plains as a newborn girl enters the world, fatherless from her first hours. She grows up in a sod-and-timber homestead where survival demands everything and beauty must be found on the wild prairie.
The Blue Bird for Children: The Wonderful Adventures of Tyltyl and Mytyl in Search of Happiness
Maurice Maeterlinck
Two poor woodcutter’s children set out on a magical Christmas quest across time, memory, and nature to capture a legendary blue bird that promises true happiness.
The Dance of Death: Exhibited in Elegant Engravings on Wood with a Dissertation on the Several Representations of that Subject but More Particularly on Those Ascribed to Macaber and Hans Holbein
Francis Douce
A meticulous antiquarian journey reveals how a medieval warning against human vanity transformed into one of Western art’s most enduring visual motifs.
The Intellectual Life
Philip Gilbert Hamerton
Cultivating the mind is a deliberate art of self-preservation, requiring physical discipline, emotional honesty, and a calculated defense of one's time against the trivialities of the world.
A Son of the Middle Border
Hamlin Garland
A relentless march westward shapes a boyhood of grueling labor and starry dreams, as a pioneer family chases prosperity across the changing American frontier.
Around the clock in Europe
Charles Fish Howell
A series of vivid hourly snapshots across the grand capitals of Europe captures the fleeting, sensory magic of early twentieth-century travel.
Cassell's History of England, Vol. 4 (of 8): From the Fall of Marlborough to the Peninsular War
Anonymous
A sprawling narrative traces Britain’s transformation across a pivotal century, where royal succession disputes, colonial uprisings, and world-shattering revolutions reshaped the global order.
Chaldea: From the Earliest Times to the Rise of Assyria
Zénaïde A. (Zénaïde Alexeïevna) Ragozin
Long before classical antiquity raised its marble temples, a vast civilization rose and fell along the alluvial banks of the Tigris and Euphrates, leaving its legacy buried under silent mounds of mud and sand.
Curiosities of the Sky
Garrett Putman Serviss
An examination of the cosmos where standard laws break down, revealing a universe governed by sudden stellar explosions, drifting stars, destroyed moons, and vast, terrifying voids.
Customs and Fashions in Old New England
Alice Morse Earle
Amid raw winter winds, cramped log dwellings, and severe pulpit admonitions, early American settlers fashioned a vibrant, highly particular, and deeply resilient domestic existence out of the wilderness.
Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers
W. A. (William Alexander) Clouston
Across diverse cultures and distant eras, human ingenuity shapes the same fundamental observations about foolishness, vanity, and moral truth into unforgettable stories.
History of Egypt From 330 B.C. To the Present Time, Volume 12 (of 12)
A. S. (Angelo Solomon) Rappoport
From the medieval Crusades and Napoleonic ambitions to the modern unraveling of the Nile's mysteries, Egypt’s past forms an unbroken chain of struggle, transformation, and discovery.
Mammonart: An essay in economic interpretation
Upton Sinclair
Art has never belonged to the dreamers; it has always been bought, paid for, and directed by the class that holds the purse strings.
Notes and Queries, Vol. V, Number 122, February 28, 1852: A Medium of Inter-communication for Literary Men, Artists, Antiquaries, Genealogists, etc
Various
A lively Victorian tapestry of shared erudition, where nineteenth-century scholars and curious readers trade historical discoveries, resolve obscure literary puzzles, and preserve disappearing folklore through open, collaborative correspondence.
Tales of Wonder Every Child Should Know
Unknown
A prince leaps over seven walls of spears to win a weightless princess, while an iron-bound captive tricks his savior into granting him three drinks of water. Global folklore gathers here to prove that wit, mercy, and sheer nerve build lasting wonder.
The Harvester
Gene Stratton-Porter
A man driven by a prophetic vision builds a woodland home for a nameless stranger, then hazards his heart and wealth to rescue her from poverty and heal her broken spirit.
The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller
Calvin Thomas
A young medical student secretly digests smuggled literature in a regimented academy, harboring a quiet ambition that will soon reshape German letters.
The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day
Evelyn Underhill
Ancient human longings for the absolute meet the empirical rigor of twentieth-century psychology in an investigation of spiritual existence. Written to bridge faith and modern science, the text examines how interior devotion translates into vibrant outward action.
The Public School Word-book: A conribution to to a historical glossary of words phrases and turns of expression obsolete and in current use peculiar to our great public schools together with some that have been or are modish at the universities
John Stephen Farmer
Inside the guarded gates of Britain's elite schools, boys speak an exclusive dialect built to preserve tradition and keep outsiders at bay.
The Southern South
Albert Bushnell Hart
An outsider explores the American South, examining its land, its economy, and the bitter divide between its black and white citizens.
Tobacco Leaves: Being a Book of Facts for Smokers
William Augustine Brennan
This compendium serves as a comprehensive, early 20th-century manual on the lifecycle of the tobacco plant, from its cultivation and curing to its manufacture and consumption.
Two Wars: An Autobiography of General Samuel G. French: Mexican War
Samuel Gibbs French
A West Point graduate traces a lifetime of soldiering from the dusty battlefields of the Mexican War to the blood-soaked trenches of the Confederacy, writing with unyielding conviction, quiet bitterness, and a survivor's sharp detail.
Vikram and the Vampire
Burton, Richard Francis, Sir
Bound by a solemn oath, a brave king trudges through the dark to carry a corpse, only to find a cunning spirit inside it that demands he solve a series of perplexing riddles.
A New Voyage to Carolina: Containing the exact description and natural history of that country
John Lawson
A vivid, detail-rich survey of the eighteenth-century American frontier, combining a treacherous overland journey with meticulous natural history and a candid account of Indigenous cultures.