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Biographies — page 39
3,283 public-domain biographies books, summarised. Page 39 of 69.
Life in a Tank
Richard Haigh
Before the heavy iron hulls ever rolled into combat, a small contingent of British soldiers traded open infantry lines for claustrophobic steel boxes, learning to master the terrifying power and volatile mechanics of the early armored tank.
"My beloved poilus"
Agnes Warner
A devoted American nurse records her relentless labor across French and Belgian field hospitals during the early years of the First World War.
Noble Deeds of the World's Heroines
Henry Charles Moore
From fiery London tenements to dangerous mission posts in the Yoruba country and the battle-wrecked banks of the Beresina, ordinary women display extraordinary courage when faced with sudden ruin, war, or martyrdom.
Saint Athanasius, the Father of Orthodoxy
F. A. (Frances Alice) Forbes
A young Egyptian deacon stands alone against emperors and heretics to save the foundational creed of the Christian faith.
Ten Girls from History
Kate Dickinson Sweetser
Courage shapes the destiny of girls who dare to lead, endure, and protect their homelands.
Adventures in Journalism
Philip Gibbs
A relentless drive for truth pushes an English journalist through Fleet Street newsrooms, war-torn battlefields, and foreign political intrigue, uncovering the human reality behind world-changing headlines.
Beaumarchais and the War of American Independence, Vol. 2
Elizabeth Sarah Kite
Before a nation could win its freedom on the battlefield, a single French playwright had to convince a hesitant king to secretly finance the revolution, risking his own fortune and reputation on a distant dream of liberty.
Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3), Essay 5: On Pattison's Memoirs
John Morley
An agonizing lack of nerve can paralyze even the most brilliant intellect, reducing a life of boundless scholarly promise to a shadow of unfulfilled ambition.
Forty Years of It
Brand Whitlock
A lawyer and reform mayor reflects on two decades spent inside the machinery of American municipal politics, charting how local idealists challenged corporate privilege to reshape midwestern city life.
Life of George Washington, volume 2 of 5
Washington Irving
A fragile army faces professional British forces while internal feuds, shortages, and desertions threaten to collapse the American Revolution.
Looking Back
Fortescue, Seymour John, Sir
This memoir traces a life of service in the Royal Navy and the inner circles of the Edwardian court, offering an intimate perspective on a vanished era of British aristocracy and global travel. It is a portrait of a man who found his greatest happiness in the shadow of a king, written with the clear-eyed nostalgia…
The companions of Pickle: Being a sequel to 'Pickle the spy'
Andrew Lang
A cold appraisal of Highland loyalty uncovers a world where honor is routinely traded for survival and gold.
The Demands of Rome: Her Own Story of Thirty-One Years as a Sister of Charity in the Order of the Sisters of Charity of Providence of the Roman Catholic Church
Elizabeth Schoffen
A devout girl enters an order of Catholic sisters, gives three decades of service to its institutions, and ultimately breaks away to expose the ironbound control she endured.
The Emma Gees
Herbert W. McBride
A volunteer machine gunner’s direct account of trench warfare in the Ypres Salient during the First World War.
The romance of Isabel Lady Burton
Burton, Isabel, Lady
Bound to an extraordinary explorer by love and a gypsy’s prophecy, an Englishwoman spends her life braving tropical fever, desert sands, and bureaucratic exile alongside her famous husband.
The Young Dragoon: Every Day Life of a Soldier
Alfred W. (Alfred Wilks) Drayson
A young English country lad trades the ploughshare for a sword, exchanging rural obscurity for the glittering uniform, brutal training, and desperate battlefields of the Victorian army.
Fabre, Poet of Science
Georges Victor Legros
In a quiet corner of Provence, a self-taught naturalist unlocks the hidden complexities of the insect world, revealing that profound scientific discovery requires only patience, reflection, and an unyielding devotion to observing life up close.
Five Months on a German Raider: Being the Adventures of an Englishman Captured by the 'Wolf'
Frederic George Trayes
A sudden shell-fire attack in the Indian Ocean thrusts a group of civilian steamship passengers into months of precarious captivity aboard a German naval raider.
In Brightest Africa
Carl Ethan Akeley
Carl Akeley enters the African bush not to conquer a continent, but to rescue its vanishing wilderness from oblivion before the encroaching modern world erases it forever.
Life of Mary Queen of Scots, Volume 1 (of 2)
Henry Glassford Bell
A youthful sovereign returns to a divided nation, where regional power, religious fury, and English intrigue turn every loyal vow into a trap.
Queen Elizabeth
Edward Spencer Beesly
A bankrupt, divided England becomes an unassailable sovereign power through four decades of unyielding financial discipline and strategic patience.
Round about Bar-le-Duc
Susanne R. (Susanne Rouviere) Day
A relief worker’s boots on freezing mud, the stink of medieval gutters, and the quiet dignity of women displaced by war.
Stories of Great Musicians
Kathrine Lois Scobey
Young minds discover that behind the world's most breathtaking melodies lie human stories of stubborn discipline, childhood wonder, and quiet perseverance.
Swift
Leslie Stephen
Driven by a cold, searing hatred of hypocrisy, Jonathan Swift turned his ferocious intellect against the political powers and human absurdities of eighteenth-century Britain and Ireland.
Thomas Moore
Stephen Lucius Gwynn
An early taste of glory can cast a very long shadow, turning later success into a battle against one's own fading light.
Abraham Lincoln
Charnwood, Godfrey Rathbone Benson, Baron
A nation forged in compromise reaches a breaking point when a plainspoken lawyer from the Illinois frontier assumes the presidency to defend a fragile Union from collapsing under the weight of slavery and civil war.
Clemenceau, the Man and His Time
H. M. (Henry Mayers) Hyndman
This account traces the relentless political odyssey of Georges Clemenceau, a man who survived decades of parliamentary upheaval and personal scandal to become the "Tiger" of France during the First World War.
Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte
Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
Behind the grand pageantry of military triumphs and political scheming lies the calculated ambition of a rising commander. Through the observant eyes of his private secretary, the future ruler of France is exposed in all his pragmatism, impatience, and restless drive.
Military Memoirs of Capt. George Carleton
Daniel Defoe
A young gentleman abandons his studies for the sword, seeking his fortune across forty years of bloody European conflict.
The Letters of the Duke of Wellington to Miss J., 1834-1851: Edited, with Extracts from the Diary of the Latter
Wellington, Arthur Wellesley, Duke of
A storied military hero finds himself in an unlikely, decades-long epistolary entanglement with a woman who believes she has been divinely appointed to save his soul.
The life and times of George Villiers, duke of Buckingham, Volume 2 (of 3): From original and authentic sources
Thomson, A. T., Mrs.
The second volume of this historical survey captures a moment of high-stakes diplomacy, charting the volatile shift from the end of the Spanish marriage negotiations to the early, strained years of Charles I’s reign. It serves as a meticulous exploration of the personal and political influence held by the Duke of…
The Life of the Right Honourable Horatio Lord Viscount Nelson, Volume 2
James Harrison
Driven by duty and personal pride, Britain’s most celebrated admiral navigates shifting Mediterranean alliances, military insubordination, and the relentless strain of command before meeting his fate at Trafalgar.
The Secrets of a Savoyard
Henry A. Lytton
A master of the light comic stage reflects on a life spent within the distinct, witty world of Victorian musical theatre. This memoir captures the disciplined joy of preserving a theatrical legacy while navigating the precarious realities of a performer’s career.
The Soul of the War
Philip Gibbs
War strips away the illusions of chivalry, leaving behind a raw portrait of human endurance, panic, and ruin. Philip Gibbs captures the sudden catastrophe of 1914 not from afar, but from the very mud and heart of a crumbling Europe.
William Penn
George Hodges
A gentle, serious youth rejects his admiral father's worldly ambitions, embraces the persecuted Quakers, and creates an American refuge founded on religious freedom and absolute justice.
Discourse of the Life and Character of the Hon. Littleton Waller Tazewell
Hugh Blair Grigsby
A portrait of a brilliant, elusive statesman, this discourse chronicles the life of Littleton Waller Tazewell, capturing the mind and character of a Virginian who wielded immense influence while shunning the spotlight of national fame.
Luther Examined and Reexamined: A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation
W. H. T. (William Herman Theodore) Dau
This volume serves as a vigorous, scholarly defense of Martin Luther, systematically dismantling the polemical portrayals of the reformer often found in early 20th-century Catholic literature. By grounding his analysis in historical context and primary source material, the author seeks to reevaluate a figure he…
Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte
Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
A fallen colossus spends his final years in exile, trading the map of Europe for the isolation of a rocky Atlantic island and the bitterness of a captive’s daily life.
A Surgeon in Belgium
Henry Sessions Souttar
This account captures the harrowing, high-stakes reality of a medical volunteer working in the chaos of Belgium during the opening months of the Great War. It provides a sobering, firsthand perspective on the shift from nineteenth-century battlefield expectations to the brutal, industrialized realities of modern…
John Hus: A brief story of the life of a martyr
William Dallmann
The life of a medieval scholar becomes a testament to the power of conviction when a humble priest dares to prioritize the authority of his conscience over the hierarchy of a crumbling church.
Journal of an American Prisoner at Fort Malden and Quebec in the War of 1812
Reynolds, James, active 1812
A captured surgeon’s mate chronicles the harrowing daily life of American prisoners of war held by the British in 1812. This blunt, observant diary captures the confusion, neglect, and survival of soldiers caught in the opening months of a forgotten frontier conflict.
My Ten Years' Imprisonment
Silvio Pellico
The quiet dignity of a man enduring a decade of unjust imprisonment transforms a political memoir into a profound meditation on the human spirit’s resilience.
The Life of Daniel De Foe
George Chalmers
Fame of families is a hollow cheat; it is personal virtue alone that makes an individual truly great. This biographical study traces the tumultuous, prolific life of a man whose literary shadow eventually eclipsed his turbulent reality.
The Somnambulist and the Detective
Allan Pinkerton
A professional investigator uncovers the dark secrets of a banking heist and a domestic conspiracy, using unconventional methods to outmaneuver criminals. These accounts, drawn from the founder of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, offer a vivid window into the methods of nineteenth-century private detection.
The Son of a Servant
August Strindberg
This is a raw, unflinching examination of a young man’s development, mapping the forces of class, family, and ego that shape a burgeoning identity. It serves as a stark, honest portrait of how an individual struggles to reconcile his own nature with the restrictive expectations of mid-19th-century Swedish society.
A sailor's life under four sovereigns, Volume 2 (of 3)
Keppel, Henry, Sir
A Victorian naval officer chronicles his decades of global service, capturing the transition from sail to steam and the realities of empire, diplomacy, and combat across the high seas.
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845
Various
This collection of essays, reviews, and literary critiques serves as a window into the intellectual life of the nineteenth-century British intelligentsia, capturing the era’s shifting tastes in politics, poetry, and social morality.
Henry the Sixth
John Blakman
This quiet, intimate portrait captures a maligned monarch not through the lens of political failure, but through the singular devotion of a man who served him. It offers a rare, humanizing glimpse into the daily life and spiritual interior of a king defined by his sanctity rather than his crown.