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All free summaries — page 86
47,382 public-domain books, summarised. Page 86 of 988.
North Dakota: A Guide to the Northern Prairie State
Federal Writers' Project of the Works Progress Administration for the State of North Dakota
A land of sweeping horizons, ancient river valleys, and harsh winters comes vividly to life in this Depression-era portrait of the Northern Prairie State.
The 1991 CIA World Factbook
United States. Central Intelligence Agency
A dense, meticulously structured survey of the world’s sovereign states and territories offers an uncompromising snapshot of global politics, economics, and demographics at the close of the Cold War.
Jane Austen and Her Times
G. E. (Geraldine Edith) Mitton
A quiet Hampshire parsonage frames the life of an sharp-eyed novelist whose modest domestic world reveals the grand architecture of Georgian society.
The Inspector-General
Nikolai Vasilevich Gogol
Mistaken identity turns a provincial town’s web of petty corruption inside out when a penniless stranger arrives.
A Week's Tramp in Dickens-Land: Together with Personal Reminiscences of the 'Inimitable Boz' Therein Collected
William R. (William Richard) Hughes
Footsteps echo down the centuries when a dedicated reader traces the physical paths of a beloved author's fictional worlds.
An Autobiography of Anthony Trollope
Anthony Trollope
An unsparing account of literary labor reveals how an unpromising boyhood turned into a life of disciplined output, professional pride, and quiet self-determination.
Papa's own girl: A novel
Marie Stevens Howland
A small New England town becomes the unlikely launching pad for a sweeping experiment in cooperative living and women's self-determination.
The Great American Fraud: The Patent Medicine Evil
Samuel Hopkins Adams
HOOK At the turn of the twentieth century, Americans spent millions of dollars to drug, poison, and intoxicate themselves. An alliance of fraudulent remedy makers and a silenced press kept the public blind to the lethal deception.
Mary Stuart: Celebrated Crimes
Alexandre Dumas
A crown promises power, but for the House of Stuart, it offers only an inevitable path to betrayal, captivity, and the executioner’s axe. Alexandre Dumas chronicles the bloody history and doomed end of Scotland’s most tragic queen.
Wagner as Man & Artist
Ernest Newman
Behind the sweeping scale of monumental music lies a deeply flawed human being whose massive egoism, personal chaos, and relentless ambition paradoxically fueled one of history’s most astonishing artistic revolutions.
The Journal of Negro History, Volume 7, 1922
Various
A sweeping archival journey through three centuries, this collection restores African American statesmanship, early community building, and international struggles for freedom to their rightful place in human history.
The Mysteries of Free Masonry: Containing All the Degrees of the Order Conferred in a Master's Lodge
William Morgan
A meticulously detailed transcript of secret rites exposes the hidden architecture, oaths, and symbolic machinery of nineteenth-century American fraternal lodges.
An English Grammar
William Malone Baskervill
A thoughtful grammar bridges the gap between scholarly theory and real-world reading. By replacing rigid dogma with living literary examples, this classic text reveals how English is actually constructed, read, and understood.
Memoir, Correspondence, and Miscellanies, From the Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Volume 4
Thomas Jefferson
An elder statesman reflects on the birth of a republic, offering intimate views on power, statecraft, freedom, and the frailties of men. Through personal letters and private notes, a political vision of America unfolds.
Norman Ten Hundred
A. Stanley (Arthur Stanley) Blicq
A small island sends its sons to war, and an eyewitness records the exact cost of their devotion.
The Autobiography of Charles Darwin
Charles Darwin
An unpretentious boyhood in Shropshire quietly unfolds into a globe-spanning journey, yielding a revolutionary understanding of the living world and a deeply reflective life of study.
Poisons, Their Effects and Detection: A Manual for the Use of Analytical Chemists and Experts
Alexander Wynter Blyth
Behind the sterile title of a Victorian chemical manual lies a sweeping, meticulous, and often harrowing map of the ways toxic substances interact with human life, law, and history.
The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln: A Narrative And Descriptive Biography With Pen-Pictures And Personal
Francis F. (Francis Fisher) Browne
A rustic childhood spent scrawling on cabin floors gives way to the heaviest burdens of statecraft in this sprawling, affectionate portrait of a national icon.
The Ship of Fools, Volume 1
Sebastian Brant
A satire on human weakness gathers a crowd of eccentrics onto a single ship bound for ruin.
The Swiss Family Robinson
Johann David Wyss
A shipwrecked Swiss family transforms a wild, uncharted island into a thriving homestead through endless ingenuity, shared labor, and unwavering faith.
Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, "Franciscans" to "French Language": Volume 11, Slice 1
Various
Knowledge stretches across centuries, binding medieval religious schisms, arctic shipwrecks, military maneuvers, and linguistic evolution into a singular, meticulously cataloged landscape of human endeavor.
The Home Book of Verse
Burton Egbert Stevenson
A sweeping journey through human feeling begins with the quiet innocence of the nursery and travels across love, loss, nature, and the restless urge to wander.
Les Misérables, v. 5/5: Jean Valjean
Victor Hugo
A young man dies when his angel leaves him, as naturally as night follows the departure of the sun.
Libretto: La Bohème
Giuseppe Giacosa
Two lovers navigate love, art, and extreme poverty in the cold garrets of nineteenth-century Paris, discovering that youth's fiery idealism cannot shield them from the quiet, devastating realities of illness and loss.
Science and the modern world
Alfred North Whitehead
An intellectual journey through Western thought reveals how mechanistic science built the modern world, where its key philosophical assumptions broke down, and why a new vision of reality must take its place.
The Hyborian Age
Robert E. (Robert Ervin) Howard
A sweeping fictional chronicle maps thousands of years of forgotten human civilization, detailing how brutal cataclysms, migrating empires, and relentless barbarian invasions repeatedly reshape the geography and peoples of an ancient Earth.
The Phantom World
Augustin Calmet
Centuries of spectral visions, demoniacal possessions, and nocturnal marvels meet the sharp edge of Enlightenment inquiry in a Benedictine scholar’s methodical catalog of the strange.
A History of Art for Beginners and Students: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture
Clara Erskine Clement Waters
A vast, centuries-long pilgrimage through visual culture reveals how human hands across diverse civilizations have continuously striven to give tangible shape to their beliefs, power, and dreams of beauty.
A History of Philosophy in Epitome
Albert Schwegler
An ambitious, sweeping voyage through Western thought, this concise manual maps the grand progression of human reason from early Greek metaphysics to the absolute idealism of nineteenth-century Germany.
Charles the Bold, Last Duke of Burgundy, 1433-1477
Ruth Putnam
A headstrong prince risks everything to forge an independent empire between France and Germany, only to see his grand ambitions collapse against treacherous rivals and defiant towns.
Hazlitt on English Literature: An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature
William Hazlitt
A passionate journey through the landscape of English letters reveals how literature springs not from polite rules or artificial polish, but from the raw, uncompromising energy of the human intellect and heart.
Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, "Haller, Albrecht" to "Harmonium": Volume 12, Slice 8
Various
A single slice of a landmark reference work spans the vast terrain between human anatomy and the mechanics of reed organs, capturing an era's entire intellectual impulse.
Literary Lapses
Stephen Leacock
A gentle, satirical walk through the minor humiliations of modern life, where ordinary people find themselves constantly outmatched by banks, barbers, and their own bad habits.
The Iliad
Homer
A devastating war between Greeks and Trojans turns on the destructive wrath of a single warrior and the relentless intervention of immortal gods. When pride drives heroes to fury, mortality claims both champion and king.
"A Daily Rate."
Grace Livingston Hill
A weary department store clerk transforms a squalid city boardinghouse into a sanctuary, proving that practical grace and quiet devotion can reshape broken lives.
Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, "Ichthyology" to "Independence": Volume 14, Slice 3
Various
Knowledge framed at the dawn of the twentieth century reveals a world where evolutionary biology, legal precedent, ancient geography, and human invention intersect in a single sweeping survey.
Every Man in His Humor
Ben Jonson
A tangle of self-absorbed Londoners parade their quirks and obsessions, entirely oblivious to the fact that their eccentricities make them easy prey for sharper wits.
Korean folk tales
Pang Im
To enter this collection of early seventeenth-century Korean lore is to cross into a landscape where the boundary between mortal existence and the spirit realm is as thin as a paper screen.
Baboo Jabberjee, B.A
F. Anstey
A bombastic Bengalee law student in Victorian London blunders through high society, confusing elaborate English idioms and causing social havoc wherever he goes.
Cat and Dog
Julia Charlotte Maitland
An pampered hunting dog learns to look past his own prejudices, forming an unlikely bond with a young cat before embarking on a dangerous cross-country journey back to their beloved family.
The voter's text book
James M. Hiatt
Offering an exhaustive treasury of foundational charters, presidential declarations, state histories, and legislative acts, this 1868 reference work arms citizens with the primary raw materials of American self-governance.
Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, "Cube" to "Daguerre, Louis Jacques Mandé": Volume 7, Slice 8
Various
A expansive slice of early twentieth-century human knowledge captures a world boundlessly curious about its own mechanics, history, and natural form.
The Journal of Negro History, Volume 1, January 1916
Various
A century of hidden history unfolds through medieval Sudanese universities, revolutionary battlefields, and clandestine church meetings, revealing a relentless pursuit of intellectual and physical liberation.
A Book of Prefaces
H. L. (Henry Louis) Mencken
American letters suffer from a timid obsession with moralizing, leaving real artistic genius overlooked, censored, or misunderstood. Only a critical eye willing to champion unvarnished truth can separate enduring art from popular cant.
Back to Methuselah: A Metabiological Pentateuch
Bernard Shaw
An eerie, grand ambition drives this sweeping philosophical drama: humanity must conquer its own brevity, extending its life span across centuries, or face absolute extinction at the hands of its own smallness.
Chelsea
G. E. (Geraldine Edith) Mitton
A walk through a historic river district reveals how royal estates, grand manors, and vibrant public spaces layered centuries of English life into a single riverside neighborhood.
The Nibelungenlied
Daniel Bussier Shumway
A beautiful princess foresees her husband’s murder, and the vengeance she extracts decades later leaves two kingdoms completely soaked in blood.
An Introduction to the Study of Robert Browning's Poetry
Robert Browning
A passionate, intellectually rigorous defense of a notoriously dense Victorian poet offers readers an essential map to the hidden spiritual depth and artistic mastery behind complex dramatic monologues.