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Biographies — page 47
2,563 public-domain biographies books, summarised. Page 47 of 54.

Colonel John Brown, of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, the Brave Accuser of Benedict Arnold
Archibald Murray Howe
A resolute soldier and early champion of New England democracy faces betrayal, bureaucratic indifference, and a fatal ambush while trying to expose a famous traitor.

Eminent doctors: Their lives and their work
G. T. (George Thomas) Bettany
A rigorous historical survey reveals how British medical science emerged from medieval superstition through the steady, unglamorous labor of passionate observation and physical dissection.

From Boniface to Bank Burglar
George M. (George Miles) White
A hotelkeeper turned burglar crafts an unsparing record of 19th-century American bank heists, official corruption, and the steep cost of a life outside the law.

Indian Biography; Vol. 2 (of 2)
B. B. (Benjamin Bussey) Thatcher
A quiet battle for historical truth runs through this book. Benjamin Bussey Thatcher reconstructs the lives of native leaders who shaped North America, resisting both colonial mythmaking and the easy erasure of indigenous sovereignty.

Mrs. Siddons
Nina H. Kennard
A girl born to a troupe of wandering actors climbs through poverty, harsh rejections, and punishing tours to become the undisputed queen of English tragedy.

My Private Menagerie: from The Works of Theophile Gautier Volume 19
Théophile Gautier
When the young French Romantic writer Théophile Gautier took in his first pets, he could not have anticipated that his Paris home would eventually harbor generations of cats, performing dogs, and carriage horses.

Nelka: Mrs. Helen de Smirnoff Moukhanoff, 1878-1963, a Biographical Sketch
Michael Moukhanoff
Living across two continents and through a century of sudden, total collapse, one woman searches relentlessly for an inner peace equal to her exterior courage.

Old Friends at Cambridge and Elsewhere
John Willis Clark
Behind the solemn facades of nineteenth-century Cambridge, brilliant minds bickered over college rules, mapped the stars, translated ancient texts, and built the intellectual foundations of the modern world.

Old Plantation Days: Being Recollections of Southern Life Before the Civil War
N. B. (Nancy Bostick) De Saussure
A quiet home, a vast network of fields, and an entire social order dissolve almost overnight into flight, smoke, and memory.

Roger Williams, Prophet and Pioneer of Soul-Liberty
Arthur Barsazou Strickland
A stubborn Puritan minister is banished into a freezing wilderness, only to transform his exile into the founding vision of American religious freedom.

Stirring Incidents in the Life of a British Soldier: An Autobiography
Faughnan, Thomas, active 1835-1883
Enlisting into the ranks of the British Army, a working-class Irishman leaves behind rural hardship to spend decades marching, sailing, and fighting across the globe in service of the Empire.

The Marx He Knew
John Spargo
A reverent old cigarmaker passes down the unwritten history of socialism's foundational theorist through the intimate memories of a lifelong friendship.

Thirty Years in Australia
Ada Cambridge
A quiet domestic intimacy illuminates this thirty-year journey across a rapidly changing young nation.

Thomas D'Arcy McGee
Alexander Brady
A fugitive revolutionist transformed into a founding father finds that the ultimate test of statecraft lies not in pulling a kingdom down, but in forging a nation out of diverse, divided provinces.

Fénelon: The Mystic
James Mudge
An exploration of divine love, high-minded devotion, and ecclesiastical intrigue, this portrait traces how a gentle seventeenth-century archbishop maintained an unshakeable inner peace through exile, bitter theological warfare, and the shifting favors of the French crown.

Four American Leaders
Charles William Eliot
A calm, measured evaluation of character shows how personal virtues, practical intelligence, and quiet spiritual independence build the durable foundations of a free republic.

Historic Girlhoods, Part One
Rupert Sargent Holland
These stories follow historical records to trace how ten young girls—from medieval saints to London authors—navigated the expectations, perils, and ambitions of their youth to become influential women.

John Nicholson, the Lion of the Punjaub
R. E. Cholmeley
In the dust of nineteenth-century India, a British officer’s iron will and terrifying presence command both the terror of insurgents and the absolute, divine devotion of the local tribes.

McClure's Magazine, Vol. 6, No. 3, February 1896
Various
A vibrant cross-section of late nineteenth-century culture, this issue captures an era when high literary ambition and popular journalism marched side by side.

My past and thoughts, vol. 4 (of 6)
Aleksandr Herzen
In exile, a human soul loses its quiet anchor, and every private grief is amplified by the storms of a collapsing continent.

Sketches of the Christian life and public labors of William Miller
James White
A plain, hardworking farmer finds himself transformed into a polarizing religious figure, convinced by his own rigorous study of the Bible that the world is nearing its final, cataclysmic end.

Ten Years' Exile: Memoirs of That Interesting Period of the Life of the Baroness De Stael-Holstein, Written by Herself, during the Years 1810, 1811, 1812, and 1813, and Now First Published from the Original Manuscript, by Her Son
Madame de (Anne-Louise-Germaine) Staël
An unrelenting tyrant transforms a world-famous woman of letters into a fugitive across a continent on the brink of total war.

A Political Diary, 1828-1830, Volume II
Ellenborough, Edward Law, Earl of
A nation's cabinet room becomes a arena of quiet desperation as an empire struggles to hold its footing against domestic unrest and continental collapse.

A Soldier's Life: Being the Personal Reminiscences of Edwin G. Rundle
Edwin George Rundle
A plain soldier’s account of life under the British flag offers an unforgettable glimpse into the raw, unglamorized realities of nineteenth-century imperial service.

Pope Pius the Tenth
F. A. (Frances Alice) Forbes
Born in a humble Italian village, a postman’s gifted son rises through every level of the Catholic priesthood to become Pope Pius X, remaining a plain, uncompromising shepherd even while confronting global political strife and modern theological crisis.

Ruysbroeck
Evelyn Underhill
An extraordinary inner journey unfolds as a brilliant, wayward child transforms through shared austerity and deep contemplation into one of Christendom’s most vital spiritual voices.

The Bay State Monthly
Various
Colonial roots, public service, and local industrial ambition converge in a rich tapestry of New England history.

The Collected Writings of Dougal Graham, "Skellat" Bellman of Glasgow, Vol. 1 of 2
Dougal Graham
A rhyming pedlar marches alongside Prince Charlie’s ragged host, recording the blood, blunder, and desperate flight of the Forty-five through a local crier's unvarnished eye.

Alexander Crummell: An Apostle of Negro Culture: The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 20
William Henry Ferris
A fiery, high-minded defense of the Black intellect, this portrait of a forgotten scholar reveals how the pursuit of pure learning becomes an act of defiance.

Coleridge
S. L. (Samuel Levy) Bensusan
A brilliant mind yields to fragile willpower, leaving behind exquisite fragments of poetry and an enduring tragedy of wasted potential.

Further memories
Redesdale, Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford, Baron
Reflections from a quiet Cotswold bamboo grove open outward into vivid recollections of Eastern traditions, European high politics, and artistic brilliance.

Letters of Felix Mendelssohn to Ignaz and Charlotte Moscheles
Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy
An intimate, lifelong dialogue in ink traces the bright rise and quiet, untimely twilight of a nineteenth-century musical genius. Through candid correspondence, two masters share the triumphs, exhaustion, and domestic quiet that shaped classical music's romantic age.

Memoirs of Dr. Joseph Priestley
Joseph Priestley
An indefatigable seeker of truth transforms open inquiry into scientific discovery, enduring political persecution to defend civil liberty and rational faith across two continents.

Reminiscences of Prince Talleyrand, Volume 2 (of 2)
Colmache, M., active 19th century
A single room can hold both the collapse of a kingdom and the quiet arithmetic of its survival. Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord moves through decades of French upheaval with a soft voice, a cold mind, and an eye for the human weak points that undo empires.

The Angel Adjutant of "Twice Born Men"
Minnie Lindsay Rowell Carpenter
A frail London woman transforms into a formidable urban missionary, risking her health to pull the forgotten and destitute from city slums.

The Eureka Stockade
Raffaello Carboni
This is a raw, urgent, and fiercely personal eyewitness account of the 1854 Eureka Stockade, one of the defining moments in Australian colonial history. It captures the spirit of a rebellion born of injustice, written by a man who stood in the barricades and lived to tell the tale.

The Gallery of Portraits: with Memoirs. Volume 7 (of 7)
Arthur Thomas Malkin
An expansive gallery of historical figures comes to life through rigorous biographical sketches, capturing the delicate intersection of individual character, intellect, and public duty.

The voyage of the "Deutschland"
Paul König
Under the shadow of a world war, an unarmed commercial submarine slips through enemy blockades, risking the deep Atlantic to open a secret trade route between nations.

Biographical Essays
Thomas De Quincey
Sharp biographical insight cuts through centuries of literary myth to expose the human lives behind iconic masterworks.

Egerton Ryerson and Education in Upper Canada
J. Harold (John Harold) Putman
This examination of Ontario’s formative educational legislation traces how a determined reformer navigated political volatility to construct a standardized, public school system from a fractured and inequitable colonial landscape.

Historic Court Memoirs of France: An Index
Various
This collection offers a sweeping, multi-generational tour of French power, capturing the intimate scandals and grand political shifts that defined the nation’s royal history. It serves as an essential, sprawling record of a vanishing world.

Isaac T. Hopper: A True Life
Lydia Maria Child
A quiet Quaker tailor turns his Philadelphia and New York homes into battlegrounds for human freedom, confounding slave catchers and reforming convicts through sheer nerve and quick wit.

R. L. Stevenson
Frank Swinnerton
This critical study offers a bracing, unsentimental reassessment of Robert Louis Stevenson’s life and work, stripping away the mythology of the "beloved invalid" to inspect the actual craftsmanship of his varied literary output.

The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, No. 65, March, 1863: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics
Various
Written against the backdrop of the American Civil War, this issue of the nineteenth-century monthly gathers fiction, biography, political commentary, and historical essays to weigh the moral, military, and human forces dividing a nation.

The Diary of a Girl in France in 1821
Mary Browne
The world of 1821 unfolds through the eyes of a young traveler whose sharp, unvarnished observations capture the vivid, often jarring, contrasts between the expectations of an English girl and the gritty reality of post-Napoleonic France.

Thomas Hariot, the Mathematician, the Philosopher and the Scholar
Henry Stevens
A meticulous recovery of a forgotten genius, this biography pulls an Elizabethan pioneer out of the shadows of his more famous contemporaries.

Canadian Notabilities, Volume 1
John Charles Dent
The lives of those who forged a nation are often obscured by the fog of myth, but these portraits seek to reclaim the human truth behind the legends of early Canadian history. By stripping away romantic exaggeration, the narrative reveals the complex motives and genuine struggles of figures who shaped a wilderness…

Cesare Lombroso, a modern man of science
Hans Kurella
A pioneer of criminal anthropology, this scientist sought the biological origins of human transgression, forever altering our understanding of the link between the body and the law.