The whole shelf
All free summaries — page 240
11,874 public-domain books, summarised. Page 240 of 248.
The Long Voyage
Carl Jacobi
A group of travelers board a sealed vessel believing they are colonizing far-off worlds, only to discover their pilot has hurled them through time rather than space.
The Natural Philosophy of William Gilbert and His Predecessors
W. James (William James) King
Centuries of scholastic thought viewed the mysteries of the magnet as a realm of hidden, celestial magic, until a Renaissance physician sought to ground its invisible pull within a unified philosophy of the natural world.
The Story of the Great War, Volume 4: Champagne, Artois, Grodno
Unknown
Guns, mud, and diplomatic strain converge as European armies lock into brutal attrition while distant neutral powers navigate an expanding war.
The Troubadours
H. J. (Henry John) Chaytor
Centuries of poetic refinement, courtly obsession, and geopolitical upheaval trace the rise and collapse of Europe’s first major lyrical tradition.
The White People
Frances Hodgson Burnett
The boundary between the living and the dead dissolves in the mist of a Scottish moor, revealing a world where love persists beyond the reach of human sorrow.
The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb
Charles Lamb
A gentle, light-hearted collection of classic English children's literature, this volume weaves together the magic of Shakespearean drama, ancient myth, and quiet lessons in everyday kindness.
Three Courses and a Dessert: Comprising Three Sets of Tales, West Country, Irish, and Legal
William Clarke
An eccentric host lays out a generous feast of rustic comedy, wild escapades, and sharp courtroom drama across the nineteenth-century British Isles.
Travels in the Far East
Ellen Mary Hayes Peck
An earnest American traveler records a nine-month journey through Eastern nations, offering a observational window into early twentieth-century global transit.
Warwickshire: The Land of Shakespeare
Clive Holland
Rolling hills, quiet waters, and centuries of architecture define a landscape forever shaped by the legacy of its most famous native son.
Who Wrote the Bible?
Washington Gladden
This examination of the Bible’s literary history argues that understanding the book’s human, natural development only deepens one's appreciation for its spiritual authority and enduring message.
A Report of the Debates and Proceedings in the Secret Sessions of the Conference Convention: For Proposing Amendments to the Constitution of the United States, Held at Washington, D.C., in February, A.D. 1861
L. E. (Lucius Eugene) Chittenden
Gathered in the shadow of impending civil war, a frantic gathering of statesmen makes one final, desperate attempt to rewrite the American Constitution and save the Republic from tearing itself apart.
A Thorny Path
Georg Ebers
In third-century Alexandria, a single reckless act of art drags an ordinary gem-cutter’s family into the fatal inner circle of Emperor Caracalla, turning a young woman’s devotion to her brothers into a desperate fight for survival.
Ballads of Mystery and Miracle and Fyttes of Mirth: Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - Second Series
Frank Sidgwick
Bound by solemn oaths, ancient enchantments, and mortal deceit, figures human and supernatural clash across timeless traditional songs.
Blacker's art of fly making, &c
W. (William) Blacker
A master angler demystifies the craft of artificial fly tying, offering detailed recipes, river guides, and practical advice for navigating the waters of nineteenth-century Britain.
Folk Tales Every Child Should Know
Unknown
A peasant trades a cow for a pig, a pig for a goose, and walks home believing himself the luckiest man alive, while half a world away a French veteran swears Napoleon drank pestilence and commanded spirits.
Game Birds and Game Fishes of the Pacific Coast
Harry Thom Payne
A practical 1913 field guide maps the rich fauna of the West Coast, translating formal natural history into a handbook for outdoorsmen.
Index of the Project Gutenberg Works of Edward Gibbon
Edward Gibbon
Navigating the vast architecture of a civilization's collapse requires a structured map of historical memory, administrative records, and thematic shifts across centuries.
Little Masterpieces of Science: Invention and Discovery
Unknown
Before the modern world was built, a small circle of investigators had to discover how force, light, and electricity actually behave. This volume captures their own accounts of how those foundational breakthroughs were made.
Maxims and Opinions of Field-Marshal His Grace the Duke of Wellington, Selected From His Writings and Speeches During a Public Life of More Than Half a Century
Wellington, Arthur Wellesley, Duke of
Behind decades of tactical command lies a governing philosophy rooted in cold realism, administrative order, and an unwavering commitment to public duty above personal sentiment.
Mr. Punch's History of Modern England, Vol. 1 (of 4).—1841-1857
Charles L. (Charles Larcom) Graves
A fierce satirical eye captures the growing pains of Victorian England through the sharp wit, outraged morality, and crusading journalism of its premiere humor magazine.
Osceola the Seminole
Mayne Reid
A young officer caught between his military duty and his personal loyalty must choose sides in the Florida Everglades.
Passages from the American Notebooks, Volume 1
Nathaniel Hawthorne
A solitary observer wanders through the coastal towns, mountain valleys, and bustling wharves of nineteenth-century New England, quietly collecting the raw fragments of reality that will later feed his imagination.
Royalty in All Ages: The Amusements, Eccentricities, Accomplishments, Superstitions and Frolics of the Kings and Queens of Europe
T. F. (Thomas Firminger) Thiselton-Dyer
Behind the gilded doors of European palaces lies a bizarre landscape of private eccentricities, reckless pastimes, and intense personal obsessions. Strip away the official state portraits, and royal history reveals itself as a human chronicle of strange amusements and human frailties.
St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, No. 07, May 1878: Scribner's Illustrated
Various
A varied late-nineteenth-century tapestry of stories, instructional pieces, and reader correspondence captures the lively, instructive, and whimsical world of traditional American children's publishing.
Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age, Vol. 3 of 3: I. Agorè: Polities of the Homeric Age. II. Ilios: Trojans and Greeks Compared. III. Thalassa: The Outer Geography. IV. Aoidos: Some Points of the Poetry of Homer
W. E. (William Ewart) Gladstone
William Ewart Gladstone examines the political structures, geography, and poetic artistry of the Homeric epics to demonstrate that Homer's world is an independent, historically coherent, and self-contained field of study.
The Blue Flower
Henry Van Dyke
An elusive blue blossom symbolizes the eternal human desire for something divine, beautiful, and forever just beyond reach.
The Dance (by An Antiquary): Historic Illustrations of Dancing from 3300 B.C. to 1911 A.D
Anonymous
Tracing human movement through five thousand years of visual art, this volume surveys how posture, gesture, and rhythm reflect the spirit of every era.
The folk-lore of China
N. B. (Nicholas Belfield) Dennys
This compendium offers an observant, comparative look at the supernatural beliefs and social customs that governed daily life in 19th-century China, revealing a deep, human connection between East and West. It acts as a bridge between two worlds, showing how the desire to navigate the unknown is a universal instinct.
The Invention of Lithography
Alois Senefelder
A penniless German playwright stumbles upon a revolutionary printing method by writing a laundry bill on a piece of limestone with grease and acid.
The Japanese Spirit
Yoshisaburo Okakura
An insider’s gentle, unvarnished tour through the layered philosophical and cultural forces that shape the Japanese mind, written to dismantle Western misconceptions with quiet historical authority.
The Magic Egg, and Other Stories
Frank R. Stockton
A quiet room suddenly seems to double its size, a quiet town receives a flurry of unexpected callers, and the ordinary rules of nineteenth-century life gently bend.
The Magnetic North
Elizabeth Robins
A brutal September gale wrecks a party of prospectors on the lower Yukon, forcing five disparate men to face an unforgiving Arctic winter together.
The Olivia Letters: Being Some History of Washington City for Forty Years as Told by the Letters of a Newspaper Correspondent
Emily Edson Briggs
A capital city in the wake of war reveals itself not in state documents, but through the watchful eyes of a woman writing at her desk.
The Paper Moneys of Europe: Their Moral and Economic Significance
Francis W. (Francis Wrigley) Hirst
The modern tragedy of currency debasement reveals how easily the institutions of stability can be transformed into engines of theft.
The Philosophy of Style
Herbert Spencer
An elegant reduction of literary expression to a single governing principle: the conservation of the reader's mental energy.
The Sauciest Boy in the Service: A Story of Pluck and Perseverance
Gordon Stables
Driven by an unquenchable thirst for the sea, a runaway British youth sets out on a high-stakes journey across global oceans, facing mutinies, cannibals, and wartime perils with steady courage.
The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume 2
Guy de Maupassant
Desire, deceit, and the sharp edge of human disillusionment collide across a landscape of French society, stretching from gilded salons to humble rural roads.
These Twain
Arnold Bennett
A masterwork of Victorian provincial realism that captures the quiet, grinding friction of two lives bound together in marriage.
Through the Sikh War: A Tale of the Conquest of the Punjaub
G. A. (George Alfred) Henty
An orphaned English boy travels to the turbulent Punjaub, mastering its languages and forging an indelible path through two fierce nineteenth-century imperial wars.
Tom Wallis: A Tale of the South Seas
Louis Becke
A brave Australian lad is swept to sea and cast into the adventurous expanse of the nineteenth-century Pacific.
Account of a Tour in Normandy, Volume 2
Dawson Turner
A journey through Normandy reveals a realm where ruined abbeys, grand cathedrals, and ancient fortresses bear quiet witness to centuries of shifting French and English power.
Budd Boyd's Triumph
William P. (William Pendleton) Chipman
A young lad walking the storm-swept coast of Narragansett Bay carrying only a small bundle must face false accusations, financial ruin, and the harsh Atlantic tides to reclaim his family's honor.
Bygone London
Frederick Ross
Inside the ancient square mile governed by the Lord Mayor lies a dense sediment of forgotten lives, vanished structures, and shifting loyalties. Beneath the roar of modern traffic, centuries of human ambition, violent political turns, and spiritual zeal lie buried under streets where Roman legionaries, medieval…
Critical Miscellanies, (Vol. 3 of 3), Essay 2: The Death of Mr Mill
John Morley
An intellectual life is defined not by rigid adherence to dogma, but by the quiet, stubborn courage to continually revise one's own mind in pursuit of truth.
Fanny's First Play
Bernard Shaw
A play-within-a-play about the generational disconnect between the stuffy Victorian past and the rebellious, restless modern future. It is a sharp, witty, and surprisingly modern satire that refuses to take itself too seriously.
Guano: A Treatise of Practical Information for Farmers
Solon Robinson
This mid-nineteenth-century manual offers American farmers a rigorous, evidence-based guide to using Peruvian guano to restore exhausted agricultural land and maximize crop yields.
Haifa
Laurence Oliphant
A vivid nineteenth-century journey reveals Palestine not as a static relic of antiquity, but as a dynamic landscape of ancient ruins, emerging agricultural colonies, and complex local societies.
Herein is Love: A Study of the Biblical Doctrine of Love in Its Bearing on Personality, Parenthood, Teaching, and All Other Human Relationships
Reuel L. Howe
Genuine love is not a vague feeling or a rigid set of rules, but a dangerous, courageous commitment to meet other human beings in total honesty.