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3,125 public-domain books, summarised. Page 58 of 66.
The Young Acrobat of the Great North American Circus
Alger, Horatio, Jr.
When a disinherited teenager escapes a grim apprenticeship to perform in a traveling show, his journey across nineteenth-century America leads through circus rings, mining camps, and stolen legacies.
The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852
Various
A vibrant panorama of nineteenth-century thought and culture, this magazine captures a world in rapid transition—where art, science, and global politics meet the dramatic flourish of Victorian storytelling.
Fifty Famous Stories Retold
James Baldwin
A treasury of historic anecdotes, legendary exploits, and moral folk tales shapes foundational literacy through timeless cultural memory.
Othello
William Shakespeare
An intimate, devastating portrait of vulnerability weaponized, showing how easily an outsider’s noble self-image can be shattered when malice feeds his deepest insecurities.
The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries
W. Y. (Walter Yeeling) Evans-Wentz
Across six Celtic regions, belief in invisible beings is not a dying superstition, but a living, sophisticated animistic faith shared by scholars and peasants alike.
The Madness of May
Meredith Nicholson
A lighthearted Maytime romance leads an anxious young man out of panic and into a spring-born world of vagabond whimsy, hidden identities, and second chances.
Criminal Psychology: A Manual for Judges, Practitioners, and Students
Hans Gross
A cold, meticulous gaze turns toward the courtroom, stripping away legal abstractions to reveal the fallible human minds—misleading voices, deceptive hands, and flawed perceptions—that truly dictate the balance of justice.
The Unicorn from the Stars and Other Plays
W. B. (William Butler) Yeats
Visionaries, wanderers, and desperate scholars collide across three prose plays where spiritual awakenings shatter the quiet routine of rural Irish life.
Historic Tales: The Romance of Reality. Vol. 08 (of 15), Russian
Charles Morris
Centuries of bloody conflict, autocratic ambition, and popular struggle shape the vast expanse of a northern empire from its tribal origins to modern naval catastrophe.
Samantha Among the Brethren, Complete
Marietta Holley
A sharp-witted farm woman takes on church hypocrisy, domestic absurdities, and official debates to demand equal justice for women in both home and sanctuary.
The Life and Adventures of Nat Love: Better Known in the Cattle Country as "Deadwood Dick"
Nat Love
Born into slavery, a young black man fights his way across the American frontier to become a legendary cattle puncher, gunfighter, and railroad porter, leaving behind a vivid personal record of the vanishing Wild West.
Peterkin
Mrs. Molesworth
An imaginative little boy mistakes an overheard parrot for an enchanted princess, triggering a runaway adventure through foggy London that tests his older brother’s sense of duty and brings a real child out of isolation.
Aunt Jane of Kentucky
Eliza Calvert Hall
An elderly woman sits on a quiet porch in rural Kentucky, sewing patchwork quilts and stringing together the vibrant, humorous, and heartbreaking memories of her vanished youth for a listening neighbor.
The Great Sioux Trail: A Story of Mountain and Plain
Joseph A. (Joseph Alexander) Altsheler
Stripped of its civil war past, the American frontier reveals a harsh wilderness where survival demands absolute courage and unlikely alliances.
The Whitehouse Cookbook (1887): Cooking, Toilet and Household Recipes, Menus, Dinner-Giving, Table Etiquette, Care of the Sick, Health Suggestions, Facts Worth Knowing, Etc., Etc
F. L. (Fanny Lemira) Gillette
A comprehensive guide to late-nineteenth-century American domestic life, this volume blends hotel-caliber culinary instruction with practical household management, invalid care, and social etiquette tailored to the expanding middle-class home.
Montaigne and Shakspere
J. M. (John Mackinnon) Robertson
A rigorous mind encounters a freer one, and literature changes forever. When William Shakespeare read John Florio's new translation of Michel de Montaigne's essays, the spark transformed Elizabethan drama into modern tragedy.
The Instruction of Ptah-Hotep and the Instruction of Ke'Gemni: The Oldest Books in the World
Ptahhotep
Ancient Egyptian wisdom maxims show how an honorable, disciplined life yields success. Across thousands of years, these timeless teachings reveal that managing your speech, treating others with courtesy, and practicing restraint build a lasting and respectable legacy.
An Account of Egypt
Herodotus
A ancient Greek traveler journeys down the mysterious Nile, recording every strange ritual, giant monument, and local myth he encounters along the way.
State of the Union Addresses (1790-2008)
United States. Presidents
Across two centuries of executive addresses, the leaders of an expanding republic debate the boundaries of federal power, the cost of war, and the duties owed to a self-governing citizenry.
The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex
Charles Darwin
A monumental investigation into human origins and animal behavior reveals how the subtle choices of mates drive the machinery of physical and mental evolution.
An Enemy of the People
Henrik Ibsen
A principled doctor discovers contamination in his town's prized public baths, only to be turned into an outcast when he refuses to remain quiet.
The Logic of Hegel
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
True understanding begins when the mind surrenders its craving for simple mental pictures and risks thinking in pure concepts. By tracing how everyday ideas dissolve into their opposites, this classic work turns logical reasoning into a dynamic map of human thought.
Myths of the Norsemen: From the Eddas and Sagas
H. A. (Hélène Adeline) Guerber
A world forged from ice and fire hangs in a delicate, doomed balance between golden halls and the crawling cold.
Tres Comedias : Sin querer
Jacinto Benavente
HOOK: A clever comedy of masks, marriage, and money keeps turning sincerity into strategy. What begins as trickery ends by asking whether love is the one thing that cannot be faked.
The gardener
Rabindranath Tagore
Love, longing, and the fleeting beauty of earthly existence intertwine in a quiet, luminous dialogue between the soul and the world.
The Keepers of the King's Peace
Edgar Wallace
An energetic colonial officer stumbles through mishaps, strange native uprisings, and absurd schemes while helping maintain British authority along a turbulent African river.
Aunt Jo's scrap bag, Volume 1
Louisa May Alcott
Gentle vignettes of everyday youth capture the quiet magic, subtle heartbreaks, and earnest moral lessons of childhood with unpretentious warmth.
Nobody's Girl: (En Famille)
Hector Malot
Left penniless in Paris by her dying mother, a resourceful orphan girl walks hundreds of miles toward an unknown grandfather, concealing her identity to win his love before revealing who she is.
Tonio, Son of the Sierras: A Story of the Apache War
Charles King
Amid the harsh Arizona desert and the brutal conflicts of the Apache War, a quiet bond between a cavalry lieutenant and an Apache scout withstands jealousy, betrayal, and military suspicion.
The Ancient Irish Epic Tale Táin Bó Cúalnge
Joseph Dunn
Two rival royal houses clash over a prized bull, igniting a war across Ireland that leaves a single teenage warrior standing alone to hold the border.
The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866: A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics
Various
An ambitious panorama of post-Civil War American intellect, this nineteenth-century magazine issue weaves scientific discovery, psychological mystery, national expansion, and contemporary fiction into a single rich tapestry.
Tolstoy on Shakespeare: A Critical Essay on Shakespeare
Tolstoy, Leo, graf
A legendary Russian novelist dismantles the world’s most celebrated playwright, stripping away centuries of unquestioned reverence to demand what Shakespeare actually contributes to human morality and true art.
History of the Transformer
Friedrich Uppenborn
Before electric illumination could power entire cities, inventors had to solve a fundamental puzzle: how to transmit energy across vast distances without losing power or burning out individual lamps.
The Saddle Boys in the Grand Canyon
Carson, James, Captain
Two ranch boys journey into the treacherous depths of Arizona's Grand Canyon to protect a hermit relative and secure a million-dollar mining claim against relentless wilderness schemers.
Meno
Plato
An arrogant young nobleman asks whether moral excellence can be taught, expecting a smooth and clever answer. Instead, he finds himself trapped in a conversation that shatters his assumptions about knowledge, memory, and how human beings learn.
The nigger of the "Narcissus"
Joseph Conrad
An immense, dark sky presses down on an iron hull as a handful of men battle the immense isolation of the open sea.
Walks in Rome
Augustus J. C. (Augustus John Cuthbert) Hare
Walking through the Eternal City reveals a living canvas where ancient pagan ruins, early Christian basilicas, and centuries of layered history converge at every turn.
The history of England, from the accession of Henry III. to the death of Edward III. (1216-1377)
T. F. (Thomas Frederick) Tout
In an age of turbulent rivalries and expanding administration, a kingdom reshapes itself through civil war, royal ambition, and the slow, inexorable rise of legal institutions.
Desert Conquest
A. M. (Arthur Murray) Chisholm
A corporate monopoly threatens to bleed the arid Western ranches dry. Local settlers band together to defend their land, sparking a tense conflict over water rights, survival, and justice in a changing wilderness.
Hurricane Island
H. B. Marriott (Henry Brereton Marriott) Watson
A yacht voyage turns into a desperate struggle for survival when mutiny and treachery strike far from civilization, forcing strangers into an uneasy alliance on a remote island.
Alice in Wonderland: A Dramatization of Lewis Carroll's "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" and "Through the Looking Glass"
Lewis Carroll
A young girl steps through a misty mirror into a theatrical landscape of talking chess pieces, tyrannical sovereigns, and paradoxical logic before discovering where her imagination ends and reality begins.
The Young Bridge-Tender
Edward Stratemeyer
A young man on a lake shore fights to keep his job, protect his widowed mother, and recover a stolen land title from a scheming town magistrate.
Notes on Nursing: What It Is, and What It Is Not
Florence Nightingale
To keep the vital flame burning in a sick human body requires far more than medicine; it demands the deliberate, rigorous management of air, warmth, light, and everyday domestic life.
A Hundred Years by Post: A Jubilee Retrospect
James Wilson Hyde
A century of postal transformation reveals how a nation once fractured by isolated roads and expensive, corrupt communication bound itself together into a modern, interconnected democracy.
The Magic Pudding
Norman Lindsay
An endless, magical steak-and-kidney pastry that regenerates no matter how much is eaten binds a trio of colorful Australian wanderers together in a perpetual, hilarious battle against scheming culinary thieves.
Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts
Herbert Silberer
This study reveals how ancient esoteric doctrines, alchemy, and secret societies map precisely onto modern unconscious psychology, transforming obscure mystical allegories into a unified science of human mental development.
Spare Hours
John Brown
A quiet observation of human nature and animal affection yields a rich tapestry of 19th-century life, medical sacrifice, and literary reflection.
Indian Child Life
Charles A. Eastman
A boy learns the secrets of the Dakota wilderness through the quiet lessons of his grandmother and the trial of a heavy sacrifice.