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34,239 public-domain books, summarised. Page 181 of 714.

Overland through Asia
Thomas Wallace Knox
A journalist traverses the vast, frozen expanse of Northern Asia on a grand mission to connect the Old and New Worlds via telegraph, capturing the immense scale of the Russian Empire and its diverse cultures.

The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century
William Lyon Phelps
Poetry in the early twentieth century stands at a crossroads, caught between the echoes of Victorian grandeur and the urgent, often jarring, arrival of the modern world. This guide illuminates the transition, charting the path from established masters to the burgeoning voices of a new, fractured era.

The Anatomy of Suicide
Forbes Winslow
The desire to end one’s own life is a medical crisis, not a moral failing. A Victorian physician argues that the mind’s tragic unraveling is a phenomenon rooted in physical health and physiological disturbance.

The History of Creation, Vol. 2 (of 2): Or the Development of the Earth and its Inhabitants by the Action of Natural Causes
Ernst Haeckel
Natural forces, acting over immense spans of geological time, have sculpted the staggering variety of life on Earth from a single, primordial ancestor. This foundational work of evolutionary science traces the unbroken biological lineage connecting the simplest organisms to the complex anatomy of man.

The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Volume 2
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The critic’s eye is a lens that brings the vast architecture of English drama into focus, revealing how genius mirrors the shifting nature of the human mind. This collection captures the essential observations of a profound thinker on the craft of his greatest predecessors.

The Pearl Story Book: Stories and Legends of Winter, Christmas, and New Year's Day
Unknown
The frost of a long-ago winter settles on every page of this collection, gathering legends, poems, and folktales that transform the cold season into a landscape of moral clarity and wonder. It is a quiet, atmospheric treasury designed to turn the darkest nights of the year into a time for reflection and storytelling.

The Rare Earths: Their Occurrence, Chemistry, and Technology
Stanley Isaac Levy
HOOK This work charts the emergence of the rare earth elements from scientific obscurity into the essential building blocks of modern industrial civilization. It captures a moment of intense transition when chemistry moved from confusion to precision.

The theory and practice of archery
Horace A. (Horace Alfred) Ford
This treatise offers a definitive look at the mechanics and discipline of archery, distilled from the expertise of a Victorian-era champion. It serves as both a manual for the aspiring marksman and a historical record of the sport’s evolution.

Welsh Fairy Tales
William Elliot Griffis
These tales emerge from a rich, ancient cultural bedrock, where the line between the natural world and the realm of myth is forever blurred by mist, music, and the shifting geography of the Welsh hills.

A Yankee doctor in paradise
S. M. (Sylvester Maxwell) Lambert
A veteran physician navigates the islands of Oceania, fighting unseen parasites while grappling with the complex collision of ancient tribal traditions and modern colonial administration.

Character Building: Being Addresses Delivered on Sunday Evenings to the Students of Tuskegee Institute
Booker T. Washington
These addresses serve as a blueprint for moral fortitude and practical self-reliance, capturing the guiding philosophy of a foundational American educator speaking to the students he helped shape.

Essays of Michel de Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne
To explore this book is to walk through the corridors of a restless, brilliant mind that refuses to be categorized. It is an invitation to examine the messy, contradictory nature of being human by watching a single man examine himself.

Great Inventions and Discoveries
Willis Duff Piercy
Humanity’s rise from cave-dwelling to the mastery of the skies is marked by the relentless ingenuity of those who refused to accept the limitations of their age. This chronicle maps the evolution of the tools and discoveries that fundamentally altered the course of civilization.

Nala and Damayanti and Other Poems
Henry Hart Milman
The ancient legend of a king and his queen separated by divine malice and reunited by the strength of their devotion is a foundational tale of classical Indian literature. This translation captures the solemn, sweeping beauty of a story that has endured as a cornerstone of epic tradition.

One of Clive's Heroes: A Story of the Fight for India
Herbert Strang
The winds of fortune blow hard across the Indian subcontinent, where a young man’s courage becomes the only currency that matters in the struggle between colonial ambition and ruthless treachery.

Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold
Matthew Arnold
These essays map the intellectual landscape of the Victorian era, arguing that a life of quiet reflection and critical judgment is the only remedy for a society obsessed with material progress.

Sixty Folk-Tales from Exclusively Slavonic Sources
Unknown
These tales offer a window into the rich, supernatural tapestry of Slavonic imagination, where ordinary lives intersect with ancient, haunting forces.

Surnames as a Science
Robert Ferguson
Unlocking the hidden histories of our family names requires more than mere guessing; it demands a rigorous, scientific approach to linguistic roots. By tracing the echoes of the past, everyday surnames reveal their ancient origins.

The Apple: The Kansas Apple, the Big Red Apple
Unknown
This collection serves as both a practical guide and a historical record for cultivating the apple, celebrating the fruit as the "healthful, hearty heart of the darling dumpling.

The Art of Story-Telling
Marie L. Shedlock
Mastering the spoken word requires more than a natural gift; it demands the deliberate cultivation of one's own imagination to truly inhabit the stories shared with others.

The History of the Twenty-ninth Regiment of Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry: in the Late War of the Rebellion
William H. Osborne
This account documents the steady endurance of a Massachusetts infantry regiment throughout the American Civil War, tracing their path from raw volunteers to battle-hardened veterans.

The Night-Born
Jack London
This collection of short stories explores the thin, often permeable boundary between civilized restraint and the primal, predatory nature lurking within the human spirit. Through settings ranging from the high-society clubs of San Francisco to the brutal, unforgiving landscapes of the Klondike and the boxing rings…

The Spirit of St. Francis de Sales
Jean-Pierre Camus
True sanctity is not found in grand gestures, but in the quiet, persistent practice of gentleness, humility, and the disinterested love of God.

U.S. Copyright Renewals, 1956 July - December
Library of Congress. Copyright Office
This directory serves as a vital historical ledger, documenting the formal extension of legal ownership over thousands of literary and intellectual works during a pivotal six-month window in 1956.

Where Love is There God is Also
Tolstoy, Leo, graf
The shoemaker who spends his days watching the world through a street-level window finds that the divine is not found in grand gestures, but in the humble acts of service he performs for his neighbors.

A Prisoner of the Khaleefa: Twelve Years Captivity at Omdurman
Charles Neufeld
A harrowing, first-hand account of twelve years spent in the brutal Omdurman prison, this narrative serves as both a testament to human endurance and a stark, unvarnished window into the fall of the Mahdist state.

A Short History of Astronomy
Arthur Berry
To look up at the night sky is to inherit a legacy of wonder, yet the mechanics of the heavens were only unlocked through centuries of painstaking observation and mathematical intuition. This historical survey traces the slow, methodical transformation of astronomy from early conjecture to the rigorous science of…

Astounding Stories, April, 1931
Various
This periodical is a quintessential artifact of early 1930s pulp science fiction, delivering high-stakes adventures that prioritize rapid-fire action, cosmic peril, and the wonder of extraterrestrial discovery. It serves as a time capsule for an era when the boundaries of science were treated as vast, untapped…

Essays Before a Sonata
Charles Ives
These are the meditations of a visionary composer, reflecting on the profound, untamable spirit of the American Transcendentalists and the eternal struggle to translate the soul’s deepest intuitions into the fragile language of art.

Forging Ahead in Business
Alexander Hamilton Institute (U.S.)
Success in the modern era belongs to those who transcend narrow specialization by mastering the foundational principles of business. True professional advancement requires a comprehensive understanding of the entire commercial machine.

Four Months Afoot in Spain
Harry Alverson Franck
A schoolteacher trades his classroom for a thousand-mile trek across Spain, proving that a modest budget is no barrier to witnessing the soul of a nation.

General Scott
Marcus J. (Marcus Joseph) Wright
This military biography chronicles the long, distinguished career of Winfield Scott, tracing his rise from a youthful officer in the War of 1812 to his status as the venerable commander of the Union armies.

Jasmin: Barber, Poet, Philanthropist
Samuel Smiles
This portrait of a humble artisan turned literary titan reveals how one man’s verse bridged the divide between the forgotten folk traditions of the French South and the cultural elite of Paris. It is a testament to the power of art to elevate the common life and serve the needs of the impoverished.

Lives of the English Poets
Samuel Johnson
A titan of eighteenth-century letters turns his sharp, discerning eye toward the architects of English verse, weighing their genius, their inconsistencies, and their moral characters with uncompromising honesty.

Memorials of Old Lincolnshire
Unknown
This collection of essays serves as a scholarly gazetteer for the traveler and antiquary, documenting the layered history of an English county through its stone, steel, and records. It captures the transition of a landscape from prehistoric iron-smelting sites to the sophisticated architectural achievements of the…

My Book of Favourite Fairy Tales
Edric Vredenburg
The old tales remain ever new, returning to delight each generation with their timeless magic and wonder. This collection gathers the most cherished fairy stories, presenting them in a style that feels both classic and fresh.

The Golden Age
Kenneth Grahame
The boundaries between a child's imaginative dominion and the indifferent, often incomprehensible world of adults form a fragile borderland of wonder and resentment. In these quiet, sun-drenched episodes, the sharp divide between the "Olympians"—the tall, dull, and authority-wielding grown-ups—and the vibrant,…

The Heart of Nature
Younghusband, Francis Edward, Sir
The world’s most formidable peaks are not merely geological accidents to be measured; they are living, breathing embodiments of a spiritual purpose that invites humanity into a deeper communion with the universe.

The Junior Classics, Volume 5: Stories that never grow old
Unknown
This collection brings together legendary tales of survival, enchantment, and moral discovery, preserving the foundational narratives that have shaped the literary imagination for generations.

The Life of Cervantes
Albert Frederick Calvert
The life of Miguel de Cervantes is as dramatic and adventurous as the fiction he created, tracing the arc of a man who survived war, slavery, and poverty to change literature forever.

The Lushei Kuki Clans
John Shakespear
The Lushai and Kuki clans emerge from these pages not as remote subjects, but as a complex society shaped by migration, intricate laws, and a profound, living connection to the spirit world. This study provides an enduring ethnographic foundation for understanding the hill peoples of the Assam borderlands.

The Old English Baron: a Gothic Story
Clara Reeve
A dispossessed youth, hidden in plain sight, seeks to reclaim his noble heritage from a usurping kinsman. This foundational Gothic tale masterfully blends moral instruction with the unsettling atmosphere of a haunted ancestral home.

The Red Room
August Strindberg
An idealistic young man arrives in the capital, only to find that in a world of charlatans and institutions, truth is a commodity to be bought and sold by the highest bidder.

The Voyages of Captain Scott
Charles Turley
A haunting chronicle of human endurance, this account traces the final, tragic Antarctic journeys of a legendary explorer. It maps the thin line between scientific triumph and absolute, frozen isolation.

U.S. Copyright Renewals, 1950 January - June
Library of Congress. Copyright Office
A catalog of intellectual property renewals from the early twentieth century serves as a vital map for scholars, tracing the legal endurance of literature, music, and commerce from a pivotal historical moment. It acts as a bridge between the vibrant creative output of the 1920s and the bureaucratic machinery of the…

A History of Aeronautics
Evelyn Charles Vivian
The dream of human flight moves from impossible speculation to a mechanical reality, chronicling the transition from visionary theory to the roar of the internal combustion engine. This record preserves the rapid, often perilous, evolution of aviation.

Across the Plains, with Other Memories and Essays
Robert Louis Stevenson
The vast, indifferent beauty of the American plains and the quiet dignity of the human struggle define this collection of essays, where the author finds wonder in the most unlikely of places.

Index of the Project Gutenberg Works of John Ruskin
John Ruskin
This expansive collection serves as a comprehensive index and compendium of the vast intellectual legacy left by one of the nineteenth century’s most formidable thinkers on art, nature, and social morality.