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All free summaries — page 171
8,211 public-domain books, summarised. Page 171 of 172.
Maria Edgeworth
Helen Zimmern
An quiet devotion to family duty fuels the career of one of Ireland’s most enduring literary voices, whose observational genius captured the heart of her nation.
Memoir, Correspondence, and Miscellanies, From the Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Volume 3
Thomas Jefferson
Through state letters, personal confidences, and administrative directives, a founding statesman navigates the perilous infancy of a new republic, steering it through foreign threats, partisan battles, and unprecedented executive decisions.
Paris, From the Earliest Period to the Present Day
William Walton
A ancient city balances its vast, unruly growth with an ever-evolving web of laws, officials, and institutions. Through centuries of administrative chaos and civic reform, Paris shapes the mechanisms that govern its daily life.
Philosophical Studies
G. E. (George Edward) Moore
Common sense and rigorous analysis can dismantle the grandest metaphysical abstractions when we take ordinary experience seriously.
Puck of Pook's Hill
Rudyard Kipling
Along the grassy banks and ancient ditches of a Sussex farm, two children meet an ancient fairy who summons figures from England's past to tell their stories face-to-face.
Rambles in Rome: An Archæological and Historical Guide to the Museums, Galleries, Villas, Churches, and Antiquities of Rome and the Campagna
S. Russell Forbes
A physical city built on tufa and travertine meets the layered memory of classical texts in a guided survey of eternal ruins.
Selected Poems of Oscar Wilde
Oscar Wilde
A disgraced prisoner watches a doomed man march toward the gallows, turning personal ruin and institutional cruelty into an unsparing song of human sorrow.
The history and adventures of the renowned Don Quixote
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
A delusional country gentleman takes up a rusty lance to revive knight-errantry, dragging his pragmatic neighbor into a world where windmills become towering giants.
The Itinerary of Archbishop Baldwin Through Wales
Cambrensis Giraldus
In 1188, an ambitious archdeacon journeys through rugged Welsh mountains alongside a crusading archbishop, documenting a world of holy relics, monstrous plagues, and miraculous landscapes.
The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898
Unknown
An intricate mosaic of seventeenth-century colonial record, this sixteenth volume captures the fragile Spanish foothold in the Philippine archipelago through raw, immediate accounts of trade, conflict, and administrative strain.
The Raisin Industry: A practical treatise on the raisin grapes, their history, culture and curing
Gustavus A. Eisen
Building a thriving agricultural industry out of sun-dried fruit requires matching fragile Old World traditions with modern technical precision and local geography.
The Scalp Hunters
Mayne Reid
A wild, romantic adventure across 1840s New Mexico follows an American traveler as he joins a ruthless band of mercenaries to rescue a young woman from captivity.
The Uses of Diversity: A book of essays
G. K. (Gilbert Keith) Chesterton
Laughter separates humanity from a serious animal kingdom, yet modern life risks forfeiting that joy to solemn absurdities.
Time and the Gods
Lord Dunsany
When the dreams of gods take physical form, they raise cities of gleaming marble—yet behind every divine creation stalks a dark, swarthy servant named Time, waiting to tear down what the immortals have built.
Travels in West Africa: Congo Français, Corisco and Cameroons
Mary Henrietta Kingsley
A fearless Englishwoman walks into the swamps and rain forests of Central Africa armed with a long skirt, an iron sense of humor, and an insatiable desire to understand the world as it is.
Travels through the South of France and the Interior of Provinces of Provence and Languedoc in the Years 1807 and 1808
lieutenant-colonel (Ninian) Pinkney
A sunny, observant journey through Napoleonic France reveals a countryside alive with resilient charm, bustling markets, and enduring hospitality.
Laocoon
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
Physical form and the passage of time create an impassable border between visual art and written words. This foundational critique dismantles the confusion between mediums, proving that poetry governs action while plastic arts belong exclusively to space.
Prejudices, third series
H. L. (Henry Louis) Mencken
A scorching, razor-sharp autopsy of American culture and democracy, where sacred cows are slaughtered with unyielding intellectual gusto and sheer prose brilliance.
The Elusive Pimpernel
Orczy, Emmuska Orczy, Baroness
A daring British hero faces down the dark mechanisms of the French Revolution to save the innocent and protect the woman he loves.
The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 21: The Recent Days (1910-1914)
Unknown
A world on the threshold of seismic transformation attempts to steady itself through quiet legal reforms and grand engineering feats before plunging headlong into global conflict.
The History of the 2nd Dragoons: "Royal Scots Greys"
Edward Almack
Steel blades, grey horses, and centuries of relentless service define a military legacy forged across European battlefields and African veldts.
The House by the Church-Yard
Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
A sleepy Irish village hides a dark web of past crimes, sinister identities, spectral visitations, and a brutal murder that shatters its idyllic eighteenth-century social life. <Image alt="Cover of The House by the Churchyard by Sheridan Le Fanu" caption="Sheridan Le Fanu's classic atmospheric mystery"…
The Royal Institution: Its Founder and First Professors
Bence Jones
Built from private papers and institutional records, this documentary narrative uncovers how a pragmatic American loyalist and a brilliant young chemist transformed an eccentric London experiment into a premier seat of scientific discovery.
The Wild Tribes of Davao District, Mindanao: The R. F. Cummings Philippine Expedition
Fay-Cooper Cole
In the early twentieth century, an American anthropologist ventures into the rugged interior of Mindanao to document six indigenous societies before industrial trade and colonial rule alter their material lives forever.
Catherine De Medici
Honoré de Balzac
A Florentine outsider navigates the deadly currents of the French Renaissance, balancing royal intrigue, religious insurrection, and the precarious survival of her dynasty.
Frederic Chopin: His Life, Letters, and Works, v. 2 (of 2)
Maurycy Karasowski
A delicate boy leaves Warsaw behind to conquer the concert halls of Europe, transforming personal exile and physical frailty into an immortal, fiery musical legacy.
Freedom's Battle: Being a Comprehensive Collection of Writings and Speeches on the Present Situation
Mahatma Gandhi
When a nation discovers that its consent sustains its own subjugation, the only path to self-respect is the immediate withdrawal of all cooperation.
John Brown
W. E. B. (William Edward Burghardt) Du Bois
A fierce, uncompromising commitment to human freedom intersects with the tragic calculus of armed resistance in this sweeping biographical portrait.
Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8
Charles Herbert Sylvester
A vivid tapestry of high-seas piracy, frontier battles, historical turning points, and Shakespearean magic awaits readers who venture inside this classic collection.
Last Poems by A. E. Housman
A. E. (Alfred Edward) Housman
A quiet melancholy permeates these verses, where youthful passion, military duty, and mortal grief drift toward an inevitable twilight.
Life and Writings of Maurice Maeterlinck
Jethro Bithell
A living writer’s soul is traced not through gossip, but through the shifting light of his published books, where quiet shadows and sudden awakenings reveal a artist reacting against the strict naturalism of his era.
Louise Chandler Moulton, Poet and Friend
Lilian Whiting
A gifted poet bridges nineteenth-century Boston and Victorian London, gathering the greatest literary minds of her era into an enduring circle of intimacy, creative devotion, and spiritual reflection.
On the Ruin of Britain
Gildas
A nation’s moral failing invites its own destruction when a forgotten people trade divine duty for internal division and foolish alliances.
Social organization
Charles Horton Cooley
Society is not a mechanical assembly of isolated individuals, but a single living, mental whole where personal freedom and social structure shape one another through face-to-face groups, institutions, and expanding communication.
The Cambridge natural history, Vol. 03 (of 10)
A. H. (Alfred Hands) Cooke
Intricate shell patterns, specialized respiratory chambers, and mysterious deep-sea adaptations reveal how soft-bodied invertebrates navigate complex aquatic and terrestrial worlds.
The history of Tabby, a favourite cat
E. Smyth
An aged, coughing cat sits in an autumn tree, teaching her youngest kitten how pride, temper, and thoughtless impulse lead to bitter regret.
The Lake Regions of Central Africa: A Picture of Exploration, Vol. 1
Burton, Richard Francis, Sir
An expedition moves inland through dense jungle and sun-baked plains, where every mile is bought with broken instruments, deserting porters, and the constant threat of fever.
The Matabele Campaign: Being a Narrative of the Campaign in Suppressing the Native Rising in Matabeleland and Mashonaland, 1896
Baden-Powell of Gilwell, Robert Stephenson Smyth Baden-Powell, Baron
A military officer’s field journal records the brutal 1896 counterinsurgency in present-day Zimbabwe, capturing the chaotic skirmishes, grueling wilderness scouting, and tense peace talks that shaped British imperial rule in southern Africa.
The Oakdale Affair
Edgar Rice Burroughs
A young woman flees an arranged marriage dressed in a stolen suit, falling in with tramps, murder suspects, and a refined gentleman on the run.
The Stock Exchange from Within
William C. (William Clarkson) Van Antwerp
In an era of relentless public suspicion and political hostility, a veteran broker steps forward to demystify the inner mechanics of the New York Stock Exchange and defend speculation as an essential engine of modern civilization.
The Traditional Games of England, Scotland, and Ireland (Vol 2 of 2): With Tunes, Singing-Rhymes, and Methods of Playing etc
Alice Bertha Gomme
Children's street rhymes, ring games, and outdoor contests preserve the ancient customs, courtship rituals, and tribal conflicts of a bygone British world.
Callista
John Henry Newman
A young Greek idol-maker in third-century North Africa finds her weary, intellectual world upended when imperial edicts demand the blood of a local Christian community.
Legends of Ma-ui—a demi god of Polynesia, and of his mother Hina
W. D. (William Drake) Westervelt
Maui is a trickster of light and shadow, whose legendary deeds reshape the world—snaring the sun to slow its course, lifting the sky to make room for man, and pulling islands from the deep ocean floor.
My Schools and Schoolmasters
Hugh Miller
A working-class stonemason explores the cliffs, quarries, and coastal wilderness of nineteenth-century Scotland, discovering that the true teachers of a human life extend far beyond the walls of any traditional classroom.
Noah Webster: American Men of Letters
Horace Elisha Scudder
Driven by a fierce, stubborn desire to free the new American republic from European intellectual control, a self-made patriot spends decades constructing the linguistic bedrock of a rising nation.
Practical taxidermy
Montagu Browne
True craft demands patient determination and a complete rejection of professional secrecy.
Shock and Awe
Harlan Ullman
A quick posture shift can shatter a foe's mental balance before the actual fighting begins.
The Boys of '98
James Otis
A swift-moving chronicle of maritime tension and land battles, this volume captures the sudden clash of empires that defined a pivotal year in global power.