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34,239 public-domain books, summarised. Page 311 of 714.

Personal Recollections and Civil War Diary, 1864
Lemuel Abijah Abbott
Daily life under fire transformed a young soldier into a seasoned leader. Written in the immediate heat of campaign trails and hospital stays, this authentic Civil War journal records the grueling, unvarnished realities of front-line infantry command.

Personal sketches of his own times, Vol. 1 (of 3)
Barrington, Jonah, Sir
A vivid window into eighteenth-century Ireland, where fierce duels, runaway revels, and razor-sharp courtroom wit define a lost world of political and social madness.

Pickwickian Manners and Customs
Percy Fitzgerald
Sixty years after Charles Dickens introduced the world to Mr. Pickwick, a dedicated commentator traces how a single book generated a sprawling cultural universe of lore, memorabilia, and obsessive scholarly debate.

Red-Robin
Jane Abbott
An orphaned, red-haired girl with a physical limp transforms a somber mill town through quiet courage, steadfast loyalty, and an unshakeable belief in human kindness.

Rico and Wiseli
Johanna Spyri
In a quiet mountain village, an orphaned boy’s sudden mastery of a village master’s fiddle sets off a journey across the Alps toward the sunlit shores of Lake Garda.

Rodman the Boatsteerer, and Other Stories: 1898
Louis Becke
A mutinous whaleman’s violent strike sets off a cascade of rogue escapes, bloody clashes, and tragic fates across the 19th-century Pacific.

Saint Bartholomew's Eve: A Tale of the Huguenot Wars
G. A. (George Alfred) Henty
An English youth with French heritage crosses the Channel to fight for his faith, only to find himself caught in the brutal, shifting tides of the French Wars of Religion.

Tales of St. Austin's
P. G. (Pelham Grenville) Wodehouse
A boy's best defense against schoolmasters, examinations, and rival houses is a complete lack of shame and an endless supply of cheek.

That Eurasian
Aleph Bey
A child born to an English father and a Muslim mother in 19th-century India struggles against British imperial racism to forge an independent identity.

The Battle for Khe Sanh
Moyers S. Shore
Encircled in the remote western highlands of Vietnam, a single garrison of Marines faces two full enemy divisions in a high-stakes battle of attrition that becomes a focal point of the war.

The Black-Bearded Barbarian
Mary Esther Miller MacGregor
George Leslie Mackay's fiery determination turns a distant island of hostile stranger-towns into a lifelong home where faith breaks open stubborn hearts.

The Boy Hunters of Kentucky
Edward Sylvester Ellis
On his twelfth birthday, a pioneer boy receives his first rifle and steps into the dense, dangerous wilderness of frontier Kentucky, where every hunt can swiftly become a desperate struggle for survival.

The Chief Engineer
Henry Abbott
An observant woodsman tracks the return of the Adirondack beaver, documenting the life, clever engineering, and mischievous persistence of a single wild matriarch-builder across nearly two decades of wilderness excursions.

The Complete Short Works of Georg Ebers
Georg Ebers
Faded dreams, dangerous truths, and unexpected blessings intertwine across historical landscapes, showing how frail mortals navigate love, misfortune, and the stubborn search for meaning.

The Dark Flower
John Galsworthy
The dark flower of passion blooms and fades across a man’s life, pulling him between the calm stability of devotions and the fierce, agonizing ache of transient desires.

The Drama
Irving, Henry, Sir
The living actor breathes life into the playwright’s static words, transforming silent text into a shared, vital human reality.

The Fall of a Nation: A Sequel to the Birth of a Nation
Dixon, Thomas, Jr.
Complacency and naive pacifism leave a mighty republic defenseless, inviting swift, brutal conquest by an imperial coalition that subdues the nation until a clandestine rebellion rises to reclaim American freedom.

The Fiend's Delight
Ambrose Bierce
This darkly comic collection dismantles 1873 American morality through unsparing satire, macabre short stories, cynical essays, and faux-journalistic items.

The Hansa Towns
Helen Zimmern
Driven by necessity across cold Northern seas, a confederation of merchant towns banded together to build a commercial empire that defied kings, held monopolies over European trade, and ultimately vanished as the world expanded around them.

The Library of Entertainment: Handbook
John Chilton Scammell
Great books require open doors, and a guide mapped out to show where every corridor leads.

The Little Colonel
Annie F. (Annie Fellows) Johnston
A hot-tempered little girl in post-Civil War Kentucky unwittingly walks into the lives of a estranged grandfather and a struggling family, determined to fix a broken house with sheer, stubborn affection.

The Malefactor
E. Phillips (Edward Phillips) Oppenheim
A wronged man trades ten years of his life to shield a callous society beauty, only to find that the world he saved expects him to pay forever for his silence.

The Missouri Persecutions
B. H. (Brigham Henry) Roberts
When religious exile turns into state-sanctioned violence, justice becomes a matter of raw survival. This historical account details the brutal expulsion of early Latter-day Saints from Missouri, documenting a tragedy of broken laws, political cowardice, and unyielding faith.

The Rifle and the Hound in Ceylon
Baker, Samuel White, Sir
Tracked game and razor-sharp steel command a wild landscape where a single misstep transforms the hunter into the helpless prey.

The Song of the Sword, and Other Verses
William Ernest Henley
A fierce, vitalist celebration of empire, martial force, and urban atmosphere, where steel, city streets, and human resolve sing in praise of an unyielding destiny.

The Summons
A. E. W. (Alfred Edward Woodley) Mason
A tragedy of duty and devotion, this First World War novel maps how personal ambition and national service collide across continents and hearts.

The Surprising Adventures of Sir Toady Lion with Those of General Napoleon Smith: An Improving History for Old Boys, Young Boys, Good Boys, Bad Boys, Big Boys, Little Boys, Cow Boys, and Tom-Boys
S. R. (Samuel Rutherford) Crockett
Childhood imagination turns a Scottish countryside into a grand theater of simulated warfare, where bruised knuckles, improvised dungeons, and playground diplomacy carry all the weight of empires.

The Woodman: A Romance of the Times of Richard III
G. P. R. (George Payne Rainsford) James
An outlawed bishop and a young heiress slip through the shadows of 15th-century Warwickshire as England moves toward the bloody reckoning of Bosworth Field.

Tour through the Eastern Counties of England, 1722
Daniel Defoe
Travelling through coastal marshes, ancient towns, and bustling trade routes, a curious observer maps the economic pulse and physical landscape of early eighteenth-century England.

Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers, vol. LXVIII, Sept. 1910: The Bergen Hill Tunnels. Paper No. 1154
F. Lavis
Tunneling nearly six thousand feet through solid Palisade diabase demands relentless precision, constant trial, and rigorous organizational control. This account details how engineers bored two parallel railroad tubes through New Jersey’s formidable Bergen Hill.

Under Fire
Charles King
To survive the brutal, unforgiving Dakota frontier, a young cavalry lieutenant must brave not only Indian war-parties on the plains, but malicious rumors, treacherous officers, and a deeply troubled marriage back at the fort.

Verotchka's Tales
D. N. (Dmitrii Narkisovich) Mamin-Siberiak
An affectionate father lulls his daughter to sleep with ten enchanting tales of the Russian wilderness, where boasting rabbits, vain turkeys, and philosophical flies reveal the humorous, fragile logic of the natural world.

When the West was young
Frederick R. (Frederick Ritchie) Bechdolt
A landscape of searing deserts and mountain strongholds frames a rugged chronicle of human grit, where lawmen, outlaws, and indigenous leaders fight to shape a wild, vast frontier.

Wild Life on the Rockies
Enos A. Mills
High above timber-line, where frozen peaks touch the sky, a lone rambler navigates blinding blizzards and sheer cliffs without a firearm. His mountain journals celebrate the wild integrity of the American West.

Ypres and the Battles of Ypres
Unknown
A waterlogged landscape where ancient canals and sunken blockhouses trace the scars of relentless war. This guide transforms a devastated landscape into a structured historical journey, leading travelers through ruined villages, lost ridges, and forgotten battlefields.

A Garden of Peace: A Medley in Quietude
Frank Frankfort Moore
A writer purchases a small acre within ancient castle walls and sets out to create a peaceful sanctuary, only to find that his quiet retreat becomes a lively stage for debate on art, philosophy, and modern life.

A Selection of Cartoons from Puck
Joseph Ferdinand Keppler
A ink-stained mirror held up to Late Victorian America captures the raucous machinery of Gilded Age politics, where robber barons, scheming party bosses, and idealistic reformers wrestle for the soul of a rapidly changing republic.

After the War: A Southern Tour. May 1, 1865 to May 1, 1866
Whitelaw Reid
Traversing thousands of miles across a ruined Confederacy in the immediate wake of the Civil War, a sharp-eyed Northern journalist documents a landscape where bitter defeat, desperate opportunism, and fragile freedom collide.

America To-day, Observations and Reflections
William Archer
An ocean liner carries a quiet observer across the Atlantic, where the real journey turns out to be a search for the shared heart of two great nations.

American Big Game in Its Haunts: The Book of the Boone and Crockett Club
Unknown
Tracking mountain sheep across frozen canyon ledges, sportsman-naturalists document North America’s vanishing wilderness to champion game refuges and rigorous wildlife preservation before wild species face total extinction.

Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, April 1900: Vol. 56, Nov. 1899 to April, 1900
Various
An exploration of industrial innovations, scientific methodology, and social debates at the turn of the twentieth century offers a vivid snapshot of an era rapidly transforming its understanding of the natural and physical world.

Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, January 1900: Vol. 56, November, 1899 to April, 1900
Various
A shift in human perspective occurs when the tools of precise observation expose the hidden mechanisms of nature, from distant planetary canals to invisible electrical currents corroding beneath city streets.

Betty Gordon at Mountain Camp
Alice B. Emerson
Across frozen Virginia tracks and snow-choked mountain trails, an adventurous schoolgirl risks everything to help a stranded stranger claim a lost inheritance.

Dick in the Everglades
A. W. (Anthony Weston) Dimock
Two boys pit their strength and grit against the wild, untamed wilderness of the early twentieth-century Florida Everglades.

Egholm and his God
Johannes Buchholtz
In a damp, provincial Denmark, an erratic inventor wrestles with debt, religious sects, and his own grandiose ambitions, dragging his long-suffering family through a life of perpetual upheaval.

Elsie's Womanhood
Martha Finley
A devotion to faith, family, and country guides a gentle Southern heiress through personal trials and a nation torn apart by war.

Fifty Birds of Town and City
Bob Hines
A brilliant streak of orange in a suburban tree or the chatter of swifts diving into a chimney can transform any ordinary afternoon. Nature endures right where humans live, awaiting only a watchful eye.

Folk-Lore and Legends: English
Unknown
In shadowed English valleys and quiet hearthside nooks, ancient marvels stir while ordinary mortals attempt to outwit the supernatural.