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47,382 public-domain books, summarised. Page 173 of 988.
Ukraine, the land and its people
Stepan Rudnytskyi
This work provides a rigorous geographical and ethnographic survey of Ukraine, framed as a foundational argument for the nation’s distinct identity and its inevitable, strategic importance in the heart of Europe.
An Englishman Looks at the World: Being a Series of Unrestrained Remarks upon Contemporary Matters
H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
This collection of essays captures a restless, intellectually ambitious mind grappling with the rapid transformations of the early twentieth century. It serves as a candid window into the anxieties and hopes of an era on the cusp of modernity.
Baled Hay: A Drier Book than Walt Whitman's "Leaves o' Grass"
Bill Nye
A collection of sketches and observations, these dispatches from the American frontier serve as a dry, irreverent antidote to the earnest sentimentality of their time. They capture the absurdities of daily life with a sharp, journalistic edge.
Discoveries in Australia, Volume 1.: With an Account of the Coasts and Rivers Explored and Surveyed During
John Lort Stokes
This chronicle captures the rigorous, methodical spirit of 19th-century hydrography, documenting the perilous surveys that mapped the rugged coastline and hidden rivers of an emerging Australian frontier.
Dream Days
Kenneth Grahame
Childhood is a secret, sun-drenched country where adults are merely border guards to be evaded. This collection of linked stories captures the fierce, fragile intensity of growing up in a world that rarely understands the importance of play.
Fact and Fable in Psychology
Joseph Jastrow
A clear-eyed examination of the human mind reveals that our greatest susceptibility to mystery often arises from our own psychological patterns rather than external wonders. Science serves as the necessary lantern to navigate these shadowed territories.
Insect Adventures
Jean-Henri Fabre
Jean-Henri Fabre reveals the intricate, often brutal, and always astonishing logic governing the lives of insects, turning a garden into a theater of epic drama.
Japanese Literature: Including Selections from Genji Monogatari and Classical Poetry and Drama of Japan
Unknown
The refined sensibilities and melancholic beauty of classical Japan bloom in these pages, offering a window into a world where poetry, status, and transience define every human gesture.
Life of Heber C. Kimball, an apostle
Orson F. (Orson Ferguson) Whitney
Driven by deep religious conviction and a rugged, intuitive nature, a blacksmith-turned-apostle braves violent mobs, foreign mission fields, and the treacherous Western frontier to help build a new religious society.
Princess Sarah, and Other Stories
John Strange Winter
The life of a young girl often hangs upon the sudden shifts of fortune, where grace and grit determine whether she is crushed or emboldened by the world. This collection of stories explores the quiet trials of Victorian girlhood.
Prophetical, Educational and Playing Cards
Van Rensselaer, John King, Mrs.
This inquiry explores the ancient lineage of playing cards, tracing their evolution from sacred instruments of divination into the ubiquitous tools of modern gambling and recreation. It offers a scholarly, if speculative, bridge between prehistoric ritual and contemporary play.
Tales and Fantasies
Robert Louis Stevenson
These narratives explore the fragile boundary between respectability and ruin, charting how ordinary lives are upended by sudden violence, shameful secrets, and the stubborn weight of family expectations.
The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, Vol. II (1st Edition)
Charles Darwin
Sexual selection shapes the natural world, driving the elaborate displays and fierce rivalries that distinguish males from females. This examination reveals how aesthetic preferences and competitive battles have fundamentally sculpted the features of living things.
The Flying Dutchman (Der Fliegende Hollaender): Romantic Opera in Three Acts
Richard Wagner
HOOK A cursed sea captain seeks salvation through the devotion of a woman, leading to a fateful encounter on the Norwegian coast. Love and damnation collide in this sweeping tale of sacrifice and redemption.
The Grey Fairy Book
Unknown
These folktales, gathered from across the globe, act as a kaleidoscope of human imagination, where familiar motifs of magic, greed, and transformation are shaken into endless, vibrant combinations.
The History of the Most Noble Order of the Garter
Elias Ashmole
This definitive record chronicles the origins, elaborate rites, and enduring prestige of England’s highest order of chivalry, detailing the lives of those who have worn its mantle across the centuries.
The Violin: Its Famous Makers and Their Imitators
George Hart
The violin occupies a position of singular mystery in the musical world, a vessel of perfect design that has defied all efforts at modern improvement. This work serves as an essential, exhaustive chronicle of the instrument’s evolution, the lives of its master craftsmen, and the enduring legacy of the Cremonese school.
Twelve Types
G. K. (Gilbert Keith) Chesterton
These incisive essays explore the hidden souls of historical figures and writers, arguing that the true essence of a person is often found in the very things their biographers overlook or dismiss.
What Shall We Do Now?: Five Hundred Games and Pastimes
Dorothy Canfield Fisher
This expansive collection of activities serves as a timeless antidote to childhood boredom, offering a structured treasury of games, crafts, and pastimes for every imaginable setting. It transforms idle hours into opportunities for creativity, movement, and quiet reflection.
William Blake, the Man
Charles Gardner
This biographical study traces the spiritual evolution of a visionary artist, mapping his lifelong struggle to reconcile the demands of religious tradition with the fire of his own creative imagination.
A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Two
Thomas Frognall Dibdin
A peripatetic scholar documents his fervent quest for rare manuscripts and antiquarian treasures across France and Germany, capturing the fading echoes of history within the silent halls of great European libraries.
Catastrophe and Social Change: Based Upon a Sociological Study of the Halifax Disaster
Samuel Henry Prince
A city in ruins provides the laboratory for this study of how sudden, violent destruction forces a rigid society to abandon its habits and reorganize under the pressure of crisis.
Corea or Cho-sen: The Land of the Morning Calm
Arnold Henry Savage Landor
The Land of the Morning Calm captures a vanishing world through the keen, restless eyes of a traveler who finds wonder, absurdity, and profound social contrast in the isolated peninsula of 19th-century Korea.
History of the Donner Party: A Tragedy of the Sierra
C. F. (Charles Fayette) McGlashan
This account chronicles the harrowing survival struggle of the Donner Party, whose ill-fated trek through the Sierra Nevada remains an indelible, cautionary monument in the history of the American West.
Hypatia
Charles Kingsley
A scholarly woman of the fifth century finds her life and philosophy caught in the tightening grip of a city fracturing between dying paganism and a rising, often ruthless, Christian orthodoxy.
Library Notes
A. P. (Addison Peale) Russell
The world is seen only as clearly as the observer’s own heart allows. By gathering the wisdom of centuries, this collection explores the hidden depths of human character and the persistence of the spirit.
Military and religious life in the Middle Ages and at the period of the Renaissance
P. L. Jacob
This survey of European history examines the dual pillars of medieval and Renaissance society, tracing how martial ambition and religious fervor collided to shape the modern Western world.
On Translating Homer
Matthew Arnold
How should a reader encounter the ancient voice of Homer in a modern tongue? This exploration of translation theory argues that only by capturing the poet’s rapid, simple, and noble movement can a translator succeed.
Quotes and Images from Chesterfield's Letters to His Son
Chesterfield, Philip Dormer Stanhope, Earl of
The world is an arena of social negotiation, and success belongs to those who master the subtle art of pleasing others while keeping their own counsel. To navigate this landscape, one must dress with care, speak with elegance, and above all, treat manners as the necessary varnish that makes merit shine.
The Children's Story of the War Volume 4 (of 10): The Story of the Year 1915
Edward Parrott
The year 1915 redefined the scale of global catastrophe, marking a shift from mobile warfare to the grinding, industrialized misery of the trenches. This chronicle offers a direct, unvarnished look at how that year changed the world.
The First Seventeen Years: Virginia 1607-1624
Hatch, Charles E., Jr.
The early history of Virginia is a story of fragile beginnings, where survival was never guaranteed and the path to stability was paved with both catastrophe and adaptation. This chronicle traces the transformation of an isolated, failing fort into an expanding network of colonial settlements.
The Lady of the Shroud
Bram Stoker
A wealthy traveler inherits a remote mountain kingdom, only to find himself ensnared in a haunting, ancient mystery involving a beautiful woman who appears in a burial shroud.
The Life of John Marshall, Volume 1: Frontiersman, soldier, lawmaker, 1755-1788
Albert J. (Albert Jeremiah) Beveridge
A rugged frontiersman and soldier rises to prominence, shaping the fragile foundations of a new nation through the crucible of revolutionary war and the intense political battles of the early American Republic.
The Light of the Western Stars
Zane Grey
A high-society woman from the East arrives in a rugged, lawless New Mexico town, only to find her destiny entangled with a self-destructive cowboy who harbors a secret that threatens both their lives.
The New Physics and Its Evolution
Lucien Poincaré
Physics stands at a threshold of immense transformation, where the solid certainties of classical mechanics dissolve into a new, complex understanding of energy, matter, and the nature of the atom.
The North Pole: Its Discovery in 1909 under the auspices of the Peary Arctic Club
Robert E. (Robert Edwin) Peary
A veteran explorer recounts the meticulous, decades-long campaign to reach the North Pole, culminating in a final, hard-won journey across the shifting, treacherous ice of the high Arctic.
The People of the Mist
H. Rider (Henry Rider) Haggard
A desperate oath to reclaim a lost family estate drives two brothers into the heart of Africa, where ancient terrors and hidden treasures await.
Twenty Years a Detective in the Wickedest City in the World
Clifton R. (Clifton Rodman) Wooldridge
A career lawman chronicles two decades of relentless combat against the grifters, swindlers, and criminal syndicates that once turned Chicago into a sprawling marketplace for human deception.
Women artists in all ages and countries
E. F. (Elizabeth Fries) Ellet
Artistic ambition often requires a fierce independence, particularly for those whose gender has historically barred them from the professional guilds and academies of the past.
A Book of Ghosts
S. (Sabine) Baring-Gould
The borders between our world and the next are thin, and sometimes, the dead have unfinished business that brings them back to disturb the living.
A Friend of Cæsar: A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C
William Stearns Davis
A young Roman’s unwavering commitment to his ideals tests the boundaries of loyalty and love as the Republic crumbles into civil war.
Autobiography of Sir George Biddell Airy
George Biddell Airy
The disciplined life of a nineteenth-century scientific polymath is captured here, tracing the transition from brilliant student to the formidable figure who anchored British astronomy for nearly half a century.
In Mr. Knox's Country
E. Oe. (Edith Oenone) Somerville
In a world of crumbling manor houses and unpredictable hunts, a Resident Magistrate navigates the chaotic, witty, and often absurd social landscape of rural Ireland.
Life, letters, and Epicurean philosophy of Ninon de L'Enclos, the celebrated beauty of the seventeenth century
Ninon de Lenclos
This collection offers a rare glimpse into the mind of a legendary seventeenth-century wit, whose salon became the epicenter of intellectual and romantic discourse in a rigid, tradition-bound France. It serves as a candid manual for the art of living with elegance, skepticism, and psychological acuity.
Manual of American grape-growing
U. P. Hedrick
Grape-growing requires more than sun and soil; it demands a rigorous understanding of the vine’s temperament and the specific botanical laws governing its health. This comprehensive guide serves as an essential manual for the serious viticulturist.
Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant: Household Edition
William Cullen Bryant
Nature serves as both a sanctuary and a mirror for the human experience in this collection of verse, where the passage of time is measured against the enduring, indifferent beauty of the woods and streams. It is a meditation on mortality, finding comfort in the belief that the individual life is part of a grand,…
Star Born
Andre Norton
A young colonist on a distant planet and a stranded interstellar pilot must unite to thwart a technologically superior, long-hidden enemy. This classic space adventure explores the collision between ancient alien legacies and human survival.
The Influence of the Bible on Civilisation
Ernst von Dobschütz
This scholarly survey traces the profound, multifaceted role of the Bible as a foundational architect of Western culture, moving from its earliest emergence as an essential church text to its modern status as a source of private spiritual inspiration.