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34,093 public-domain books, summarised. Page 101 of 711.
Twenty Years at Hull House
Jane Addams
A young woman confronts the profound human misery of industrial Chicago and resolves to live among the city's poorest residents, transforming a decaying neighborhood mansion into an engine of social progress.
Ethics
John Dewey
Human conduct transforms from unreflective group custom into conscious moral judgment through history, individual reflection, and the ongoing struggle to reshape social and economic institutions.
Myths of China and Japan: with illustrations in colour & monochrome after paintings and photographs
Donald A. (Donald Alexander) Mackenzie
Far Eastern myths are not isolated creations of a secluded East, but vibrant threads woven from ancient global trade, migrating beliefs, and shared human longings.
Life of Adam Smith
John Rae
A quiet Scottish professor transforms the study of human commerce and morality, laying the intellectual foundations of the modern economic world.
Six Centuries of English Poetry: Tennyson to Chaucer
James Baldwin
Six centuries of poetic expression reveal how language shifts while human longings remain fundamentally unchanged.
The Ancient Regime
Hippolyte Taine
An aristocratic social order implodes when its privileged elite retains immense wealth and authority while abdicating all moral duty and public service to the suffering people below.
The Jacket (The Star-Rover)
Jack London
A condemned prisoner undergoes severe solitary confinement and discovers a mental technique to slip his body's constraints, traveling backward through his previous incarnations across world history to escape the horrors of his physical cell.
The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4): A Plain Story Simply Told
J. Arthur (John Arthur) Thomson
Clear, accessible, and vast in scope, this survey of physical and biological reality brings complex natural phenomena directly to the general reader. It presents a majestic vision of a structured, dynamic universe.
Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, "England" to "English Finance": Volume 9, Slice 4
Various
A nation's physical landscape, administrative mechanics, religious struggles, and fiscal machinery converge to reveal how medieval kingdom traditions transformed into a modern sovereign empire.
Life of Mozart, Vol. 1 (of 3)
Otto Jahn
An ambitious child tours the brilliant, unforgiving courts of eighteenth-century Europe, transforming from a precocious miracle into a fiery young master of the musical world.
The Principles of Chemistry, Volume I
Dmitry Ivanovich Mendeleyev
A grand attempt to organize the physical world transforms raw chemical observations into universal natural laws through the rigorous lens of laboratory experiment and atomic theory.
The Underground Railroad from Slavery to Freedom: A comprehensive history
Wilbur Henry Siebert
A secretive, unwritten network spans thousands of miles, quietly defying federal laws to shepherd desperate men, women, and children out of bondage into the freezing promise of the North.
The Vicar of Wakefield
Oliver Goldsmith
A gentle, high-minded country vicar loses his fortune and is dragged with his family through a series of absurd deceptions, catastrophic losses, and villainous betrayals, only to find his faith in human goodness tested to its absolute limit.
Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley: Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge, Vol. I
E. G. (Ephraim George) Squier
Across the floodplains of the American Heartland lie thousands of massive, forgotten earthworks—monumental geometrical enclosures, mysterious stone altars, and colossal effigies of giant serpents and alligators—built by a lost ancient civilization.
Blue Bonnet's Ranch Party
Caroline Elliott Hoogs Jacobs
A sixteen-year-old girl brings her Massachusetts schoolmates to her Texas cattle ranch, where dusty trails, river spills, and summer campfires test their friendships and show her what growing up really means.
Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 2
Charles Eliot
Tracing the vast evolution of Eastern spiritual thought, this monumental work examines how ancient doctrines shifted across centuries, absorbed local traditions, and transformed the religious landscape of Asia.
The Further Adventures of Robinson Crusoe
Daniel Defoe
Driven by an inescapable restlessness, an aging adventurer leaves his quiet wealth to revisit his famous island, launching an astounding journey across unpredictable oceans, violent skirmishes, and the vast overland deserts of China and Siberia.
An Australian in China
George Ernest Morrison
A journey of thousands of miles across late-nineteenth-century China becomes an unvarnished, clear-eyed examination of a country's internal life, seen on foot by an observant medical doctor.
Creative Intelligence: Essays in the Pragmatic Attitude
John Dewey
Human intelligence is not a passive mirror reflecting an unchangeable reality, but an active, creative instrument for shaping an uncertain future.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Samuel McChord Crothers
An illuminating light sweeps across a dark terrain, catching isolated ideas in brilliant relief before moving on. Rather than building a closed system, it invites every reader to become a willing participant in the open adventure of thinking.
Views of nature: or Contemplations on the sublime phenomena of creation: with scientific illustrations
Alexander von Humboldt
Across steppes, frozen tundras, and high mountain passes, a vast web of climate and soil shapes every living form. Nature unfolds not as a random collection of plants and animals, but as an interconnected, dynamic system.
A Letter to a Hindu
Tolstoy, Leo, graf
True liberation requires abandoning violent resistance and embracing the universal law of love, through which no population can be enslaved by another.
Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, "Helmont, Jean" to "Hernosand": Volume 13, Slice 3
Various
An intricate survey of human knowledge unfolds, capturing a world in the process of defining its history, natural sciences, and cultural achievements.
If You Touch Them They Vanish
Gouverneur Morris
A young man, wrongfully imprisoned and exiled to a wilderness sanctuary, builds a vibrant inner world to guard his sanity against absolute isolation.
The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index
Unknown
A rich cross-section of nineteenth-century prose opens a doorway into the evolving mind, humor, and historical imagination of a young American nation.
The Captain of the Polestar, and Other Tales
Arthur Conan Doyle
Amid high-latitude ice fields, isolated gold rushes, and museum vaults, human reason falters whenever it confronts the uncanny.
The collected works of William Hazlitt, Vol. 01 (of 12)
William Hazlitt
A combative mind takes on the literary establishment, defending the vitality of art and human nature against frozen dogmas, cautious critics, and political hypocrites.
The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (Third Edition, Vol. 09 of 12)
James George Frazer
Across cultures and centuries, human societies have attempted to cleanse themselves of misfortune by burdening a physical entity with their collective sins and driving it away into the wilderness.
The Philosophy of Fine Art, volume 2 (of 4): Hegel's Aesthetik
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Art begins in a state of wonder, striving to give physical form to human thought. It moves through stages of symbolic search, reaches perfect harmony in classical sculpture, and finally dissolves into the internal, boundless world of the romantic spirit.
Lost Face
Jack London
A man outwits his executioners in his final moments; another carries a cursed dog across continents; a third freezes silently on a barren trail.
The Nursery "Alice"
Lewis Carroll
A little girl falls down a deep well into a strange world where growth and shrinkage follow every bite, and animals talk in riddles.
Europa's Fairy Book
Joseph Jacobs
A timeless folk legacy re-emerges through centuries of shared storytelling, binding distant cultures together in wonder.
Peculiarities of American Cities
Willard W. Glazier
A traveler steps into dozens of nineteenth-century towns, mapping their distinctive atmospheres, monuments, and daily habits with an observer's steady eye.
Reconstruction in Philosophy
John Dewey
A radical shift in human understanding occurs when thought abandons the search for eternal absolutes and becomes a flexible tool for fixing actual problems.
The Koran (Al-Qur'an)
George Sale
A voice calling out of seventh-century Arabia reshape the desert, demanding total surrender to one unseen Creator while setting down strict laws to govern society and daily life.
The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. 24
Robert Louis Stevenson
Courage in the face of physical collapse drives this intimate self-portrait of a artist writing against time and ill health.
History of the Colony and Ancient Dominion of Virginia
Charles Campbell
A colony forged in swamp and fire evolves through two centuries of blood, political friction, and frontier ambition into the backbone of a new republic.
Nazi conspiracy and aggression, Volume 02 (of 11)
United States. Office of Chief of Counsel for the Prosecution of Axis Criminality
A chilling assembly of original documents, directives, and court exhibits meticulously lays bare how a modern state turned every lever of law, military force, and bureaucracy toward criminal ends.
Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I.: With An Historical Sketch Of The Origin And Growth Of The Drama In England
Henry Norman Hudson
A study of Shakespeare’s life, dramatic heritage, and theatrical art that views his plays as living moral landscapes rather than mere literary monuments.
Tales from Shakespeare
Charles Lamb
A collection of classic plays transformed into prose narratives opens up rich theatrical worlds, offering readers a clear and accessible entrance into dramatic literature while carefully retaining the spirit, vocabulary, and cadence of the original works.
The Baby's Own Aesop
Aesop
A sly fox jumps in vain for high-hanging fruit, only to walk away muttering that the crop was probably bitter anyway.
The Guermantes Way
Marcel Proust
A youth’s obsessive enchantment with an unreachable aristocratic world slowly gives way to the realization that its dazzling surface conceals the same vanity, triviality, and human frailties found everywhere else.
The History and Antiquities of the Doric Race, Vol. 2 of 2
Karl Otfried Müller
Down the long, centuries-deep corridors of ancient Greece, a disciplined order emerges from the mists of legend, where statecraft is treated as a severe moral sculpture rather than a engine of individual license.
The Persian Mystics: Jalálu'd-dín Rúmí
Maulana Jalal al-Din Rumi
To cross the border from the material to the divine, one must cast aside the body's heavy cloak and enter a fire where lover and Beloved melt into a single, endless light.
Nationalism
Rabindranath Tagore
When the modern state transforms society into a hyper-efficient machine of power, human moral freedom is crushed under the weight of abstract organization, aggressive greed, and universal suspicion.
The Child of Pleasure
Gabriele D'Annunzio
An aristocratic Roman esthete attempts to reconstruct his life through art and passion, only to find himself caught between spiritual devotion and self-destructive desire.
The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II.: Continued from the Reign of William and Mary to the Death of George II
T. (Tobias) Smollett
Crowns change hands, dynasties shift, and global empires collide in a sweeping chronicle of power, war, and political friction. Tobias Smollett paints an expansive, unvarnished portrait of an era that forged modern Britain through continuous conflict and internal strife.
Tommy Trot's Visit to Santa Claus
Thomas Nelson Page
Two boys, a home-built sled, and a pair of goats set out across the snow on a Christmas night journey that leads to Santa's workshop and an icy duel with a polar bear.