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34,239 public-domain books, summarised. Page 204 of 714.

The Social Principles of Jesus
Walter Rauschenbusch
This work invites readers to strip away centuries of accumulated dogma and look directly at the revolutionary social core of Jesus’ teachings. It presents a vision of faith that is inseparable from the struggle for justice.

Birds, Beasts and Flowers: Poems by D. H. Lawrence
D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
This collection of poetry captures the restless, sensory intensity of a traveler caught between the crumbling structures of European history and the raw, unmapped vitality of the American landscape. It is a work of visceral observation, where the natural world serves as both a mirror for human desire and a reproach…

Elevator Systems of the Eiffel Tower, 1889
Robert M. Vogel
The iron legs of the Eiffel Tower once posed a mechanical riddle so complex that it halted the progress of the 1889 World’s Fair. To solve it, engineers had to invent a new language for vertical travel.

History of Julius Cæsar, Vol. 1 of 2
Emperor of the French Napoleon III
The life and career of history’s most famous Roman general are reimagined here as a study in the inevitable rise of the singular leader, tracing the path from the ancient Republic to the threshold of empire.

Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics: With Some of Their Applications
William Thomas Thornton
This work challenges the secular philosophies of its era, defending the existence of free will and a divine presence against the rising tide of mechanical materialism. It serves as a rigorous, impassioned critique of Victorian-era scientific skepticism.

Pirates
Johnson, Charles, active 1724-1731
These accounts strip away the romantic veneer of the high seas, exposing the grim, often brutal reality of men who chose a life of violence and certain death. Through a series of stark biographies, the reader encounters a world where the line between privateer and criminal was often drawn in blood and salt water.

The Cabinetmaker in Eighteenth-Century Williamsburg: Giving Attention to the City's Chief Craftsmen in the Furniture Way
Johannes Heuvel
This study reconstructs the labor of colonial Virginia’s furniture makers, proving that their modest, provincial work was as essential to the foundation of Williamsburg as the political debates held in its halls. It reveals how these craftsmen balanced artistic ambition with the harsh realities of a…

The Cathedral
J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
The architecture of faith is a towering, silent presence that shapes the soul’s deepest contours. Within this stone forest, a man seeks to move beyond the boundaries of his own restless, modern weariness.

The Discovery and Conquest of the Molucco and Philippine Islands.: Containing their History, Ancient and Modern, Natural and Political: Their Description, Product, Religion, Government, Laws, Languages, Customs, Manners, Habits, Shape, and Inclinations of the Natives. With an Account of many other adjacent Islands, and several remarkable Voyages through the Streights of Magellan, and in other Parts
Bartolomé Leonardo de Argensola
The history of the Moluccas and the Philippines unfolds as a sprawling, volatile chronicle of colonial ambition, where shifting allegiances and the clash of empires define the fate of distant island kingdoms.

The lost Atlantis, and other ethnographic studies
Wilson, Daniel, Sir
This collection of ethnographic studies examines the deep history of the American continent through the lens of nineteenth-century anthropology, probing the origins of its indigenous peoples and the validity of legendary trans-Atlantic contacts. It serves as a rigorous, scholarly attempt to sift through the myth…

Women of Modern France (Illustrated): Woman: In all ages and in all countries Vol. 7 (of 10)
Hugo P. (Hugo Paul) Thieme
French women have historically balanced intense emotionality with a calculating, mathematical approach to life, using both to exert a profound and often underestimated influence on the nation’s social and political trajectory.

A Simpleton
Charles Reade
This is a story of a young doctor, his impulsive wife, and the brutal collision between their idealistic romance and the harsh, materialistic world. It explores how innocence survives—or falters—under the weight of financial ruin and long-held secrets.

Fifty Years a Hunter and Trapper: Autobiography, experiences and observations of Eldred Nathaniel Woodcock during his fifty years of hunting and trapping
E. N. (Eldred Nathaniel) Woodcock
A life defined by the rhythmic scent of pine and the cold snap of a steel trap, this memoir captures the vanishing wilderness of the nineteenth-century American frontier.

In Search of the Unknown
Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers
This collection of interconnected tales chronicles the misadventures of eccentric naturalists in search of impossible beasts, where scientific inquiry often collides with the inexplicable, the romantic, and the absurd.

Inventors
Philip Gengembre Hubert
The story of human progress is often a ledger of brilliance balanced against the harsh indifference of a society that consumes the work while disregarding the worker. This collection of biographical sketches documents the high cost of ingenuity.

Lives of Girls Who Became Famous
Sarah Knowles Bolton
The path to greatness is paved with earnest activity, persistence, and a refusal to see life as merely a play-day. These sketches demonstrate that noble character and intellectual cultivation are the true architects of enduring fame.

Lives of the Fur Folk
Maud D. (Maud Doria) Haviland
The wild woods of Knockdane hold secrets that vanish the moment a human footfall disturbs the silence. These are the intimate, often brutal histories of the creatures who share the earth, told from the ground level of their own survival.

Mary Olivier: a Life
May Sinclair
To understand the weight of a life, one must examine the quiet, crushing accumulation of its days. This story traces the long, inward journey of a woman finding her own soul in the shadow of a stifling home.

My autobiography
Benito Mussolini
This account chronicles the rise of a political movement through the eyes of its founder, offering a primary look at the transformation of the Italian state during the early twentieth century. It serves as both a personal reflection and a formal articulation of a regime’s core ideology.

Opportunities in Engineering
Charles M. (Charles Marcus) Horton
To build a life in engineering is to marry the precision of the slide-rule with the calloused hands of a builder. It is a dual existence for those who find their deepest satisfaction in both thinking and doing.

Parenthood and Race Culture: An Outline of Eugenics
C. W. (Caleb Williams) Saleeby
The future of civilization rests upon the intentional selection of parents; this urgent manifesto argues that human progress depends not on external wealth, but on the biological quality of the next generation.

Pickle the Spy
Andrew Lang
The hidden history of a Jacobite traitor reveals the slow, shadowed decay of a royal cause. It is an act of historical detection that unmasks a spy amidst the wreckage of a failed rebellion.

The Education of the Negro Prior to 1861: A History of the Education of the Colored People of the United States from the Beginning of Slavery to the Civil War
Carter Godwin Woodson
Against the crushing weight of institutional slavery, generations of African Americans pursued literacy and learning as the essential tools of their eventual emancipation. This historical account recovers the hidden struggle for enlightenment that occurred long before the Civil War began.

The Eleven Comedies, Volume 1
Aristophanes
These five plays are a high-speed collision between biting political satire and absurd, bawdy farce, capturing the manic energy of a city at war with itself.

The Memoirs of Count Carlo Gozzi
Carlo Gozzi
This is a portrait of a man who waged war with his pen against the changing fashions of eighteenth-century Venice. It is a prickly, vivid, and deeply opinionated account of a life defined by literary feuds.

Views and Reviews
Henry James
The sharp, discerning eye of a master novelist turns toward his contemporaries, capturing the literary landscape of the late nineteenth century with elegant precision and exacting standards.

Visual Illusions: Their Causes, Characteristics and Applications
Matthew Luckiesh
Optical illusions are not mere parlor tricks but fundamental features of human sight, revealing the complex, often unreliable bridge between the physical world and our internal perception. This investigation catalogs the mechanisms—biological, psychological, and environmental—that cause our eyes to deceive our minds.

What All The World's A-Seeking: The Vital Law of True Life, True Greatness Power and Happiness
Ralph Waldo Trine
The quest for greatness and enduring peace is not found by chasing external accolades, but by aligning one’s inner life with the universal laws of love, service, and spiritual harmony.

An Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant
Edward Caldwell Moore
The history of religious thought since Kant is a story of profound transition, tracing how the rigid dogmas of the past crumbled before the relentless, evolving demands of modern philosophy, science, and historical inquiry.

Early Reviews of English Poets
John Louis Haney
The history of literature is often written by the victors, but this collection unearths the biting, often cruel, contemporary judgments that once greeted the now-hallowed masterpieces of English poetry.

Green Tea
Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
The veil between the living and the dead is thinned by obsession and guilt, inviting unseen, malevolent forces to cross the threshold into our physical world.

Human Nature in Politics: Third Edition
Graham Wallas
Political life is rarely the product of cool, rational deliberation, but rather a complex web of instinct, habit, and emotion. We often act in politics not as calculating thinkers, but as creatures driven by the impulses of our nature.

Spies of the Kaiser: Plotting the Downfall of England
William Le Queux
HOOK England sits on the precipice of a secret invasion, its defenses compromised by a vast, hidden network of foreign agents operating in plain sight.

Symphonies and Their Meaning
Philip H. (Philip Henry) Goepp
A guide to the symphonic landscape of the early twentieth century, this work invites listeners to look past technical analysis toward the living, breathing emotional narratives hidden within complex orchestral scores.

The Ballads & Songs of Derbyshire: With Illustrative Notes, and Examples of the Original Music, etc
Unknown
This collection gathers the scattered voices of a county, preserving the rhymes, legends, and rhythmic folk memories that shaped the identity of the English Midlands. It offers a rare glimpse into the oral traditions that once echoed through Derbyshire’s hills and taverns.

The Æneid of Virgil translated into English prose
Virgil
Driven by destiny and the relentless hostility of the gods, a displaced hero seeks a new homeland for his people while struggling to reconcile his personal desires with the heavy demands of his divine mission.

The Paths of Inland Commerce
Archer Butler Hulbert
The building of a nation is written in the tracks of its pioneers, a chronicle of rivers, trails, and iron roads that transformed a fractured wilderness into a unified commercial power.

The Poems of Emma Lazarus, Volume 1
Emma Lazarus
This collection of poetry and drama captures the intellectual and emotional evolution of a brilliant 19th-century American voice, moving from the ethereal, romantic concerns of her youth to the urgent, moral clarity of her maturity.

The River-Names of Europe
Robert Ferguson
The names etched into the landscapes of Europe are not random, but hold the echoes of ancient tongues. These linguistic fossils reveal the shared origins of the rivers that define the continent’s geography.

A Manual of American Literature
Unknown
This survey captures the evolution of American letters from the colonial pulpit to the dawn of the twentieth century. It serves as a grounded, encyclopedic record of the writers and political forces that shaped the nation’s voice.

An Inquiry into the Causes and Effects of the Variolae Vaccinae: A Disease Discovered in Some of the Western Counties of England, Particularly Gloucestershire, and Known by the Name of the Cow Pox
Edward Jenner
This foundational medical text introduces the revolutionary discovery that cowpox provides a lifelong shield against the lethal smallpox virus. It marks the birth of modern immunology through meticulous observation and clinical experimentation.

Critical, Historical, and Miscellaneous Essays
Macaulay, Thomas Babington Macaulay, Baron
These essays serve as a panoramic window into the nineteenth-century British mind, blending sweeping historical narratives with sharp, combative critiques of politics, education, and the moral failings of the state.

Greatest wonders of the world, as seen and described by famous writers
Unknown
This curated collection gathers the literary world’s most evocative responses to the planet’s grandest landscapes, offering a window into the awe-inspiring sights that have long captivated the human imagination.

Handbook of the Trees of New England
Henry M. (Henry Mason) Brooks
The forest is a map of hidden boundaries, where northern and southern species meet, intermingle, and occasionally struggle for a foothold in the rugged, varied landscape of New England.

Mob Rule in New Orleans: Robert Charles and His Fight to Death, the Story of His Life, Burning Human Beings Alive, Other Lynching Statistics
Ida B. Wells-Barnett
The spark of a singular, fatal encounter ignites a conflagration of racial violence, forcing a reckoning with the systemic lawlessness that defines an era.

Notes and Letters on the Natural History of Norfolk: More Especially on the Birds and Fishes
Browne, Thomas, Sir
A quiet, sharp-eyed observer catalogs the wild creatures of a coastal English county, bridging the gap between ancient folklore and the dawn of modern scientific inquiry. These fragments reveal a mind that treasures every feather, fin, and shell with meticulous curiosity.

On the Art of Writing: Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914
Arthur Quiller-Couch
Literature is not a mere science to be studied, but an art to be practiced; it is a living business that demands the active participation of the writer.

The Nineteenth and Their Times: Being an Account of the Four Cavalry Regiments in the British Army That Have Borne the Number Nineteen and of the Campaigns in Which They Served
J. (John) Biddulph
This chronicle traces the lineage and combat history of the four distinct cavalry regiments that carried the number nineteen in the British Army. It serves as a meticulous record of imperial service from the eighteenth to the late nineteenth century.