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All free summaries — page 221
34,239 public-domain books, summarised. Page 221 of 714.
Government in the United States, National, State and Local
James Wilford Garner
A republic endures only when its citizens comprehend the interlocking machinery of town meetings, state halls, and federal powers that govern their daily lives.
Leigh Hunt's Relations with Byron, Shelley and Keats
Barnette Miller
Four literary destinies intertw in an era of fierce political backlash, forging a crucial chapter in the history of English Romanticism.
Modern French Philosophy: a Study of the Development Since Comte
John Alexander Gunn
Seeking to soothe the wounds of a fractured society, nineteenth-century French thinkers turned away from rigid dogmas to rebuild philosophy as a living force centered on human action, personality, and the genuine possibility of freedom.
Mrs. Gaskell
Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
To capture the warmth, social acuity, and dramatic range of Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell, Esther Alice Chadwick compiles a single volume that mirrors the full breadth of a quiet yet remarkably influential career.
'Oh, Well, You Know How Women Are!'
Mary Roberts Rinehart
Two affectionate, lighthearted essays trade gentle barbs to expose how men and women navigate daily life, fashion, and each other.
Our Moslem Sisters: A Cry of Need from Lands of Darkness Interpreted by Those Who Heard It
Unknown
Veiled figures, locked doors, and broken lives across continents reveal a hidden world where millions of women endure systemic oppression, waiting for hope to pierce their isolation.
Personality in Literature
R. A. (Rolfe Arnold) Scott-James
Great critical writing does not merely judge art; it demands that the reader bring an equal, energetic vitality to the act of reading itself. R. A. Scott-James insists that true literature is a direct expression of human character, requiring an active mind to meet its passion half-way.
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Part 3
Mark Twain
In a small Mississippi River town, childhood fantasy collides with brutal adult reality when a boy's midnight prank in a graveyard leaves him sole witness to a horrific murder.
The Black Fawn
Jim Kjelgaard
An anxious city orphan arrives at a quiet mountain farm, where a rare black fawn and an aging farmer teach him how to belong.
The Bounty of the Chesapeake: Fishing in Colonial Virginia
James Wharton
Before European settlers ever cast a net into the Tidewater, indigenous communities had perfected the art of drawing rich sustenance from the rivers and bay.
The Happy Golfer: Being Some Experiences, Reflections, and a Few Deductions of a Wandering Golfer
Henry Leach
A globetrotting journey reveals how a simple Scottish pastime transformed into a global obsession, bonding players across continents through shared trial and psychological fascination.
The Human Race
Louis Figuier
An expansive nineteenth-century survey charts the physical forms, social structures, and daily habits of global human populations. Driven by a central conviction in the shared biological unity of all humankind, the text maps the globe through a detailed catalog of its diverse peoples.
The Land of the Miamis: An Account of the Struggle to Secure Possession of the North-West from the End of the Revolution until 1812
Elmore Barce
Driven by geography, trade, and blood, the struggle for the American Old Northwest was a decades-long collision between native nations, aggressive American settlers, and entrenched British interests.
The life and teaching of Karl Marx
Max Beer
A revolutionary intellectual life unfolds through rigorous philosophy, fiery agitation, and the systematic dismantling of economic orthodoxies.
The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 3 (of 3): 1890-1898
John Morley
An elder statesman navigate the turbulent final decades of his public existence, pitting his unyielding moral vision against imperial entanglements, parliamentary fractures, and the intractable puzzle of Irish self-determination.
The Life-Story of Insects
George H. (George Herbert) Carpenter
A quiet miracle occurs whenever a crawling grub sheds its skin to reveal hidden wings.
The psycho-analytic study of the family
J. C. (John Carl) Flugel
Unconscious family attachments form the quiet foundation of human character, dictating choices in love, career, and belief long after childhood ends.
The Rough Riders
Theodore Roosevelt
A regiment composed of cowboys, Ivy League athletes, and American Indian trackers forms in the Southwestern dust, bound for the dense jungles of Cuba. Their swift, brutal campaign reveals the grim reality of modern war behind national myths.
The Seventh Man
Max Brand
Bound by devotion and driven by revenge, a mountain recluse takes on a relentless posse across a rugged wilderness, only to face a tragic final reckoning with the family he left behind.
The Story of Burnt Njal: The Great Icelandic Tribune, Jurist, and Counsellor
Dasent, George Webbe, Sir
Blood feuds, legal brilliance, and relentless vengeance collide in a land governed entirely by code and iron.
The Thousand and One Days: A Companion to the "Arabian Nights"
Miss (Julia) Pardoe
An ancient treasure subterranean, a princess demanding impossible answers, and a king disguising himself to walk among his subjects form the rich fabric of these classic Eastern tales.
The village labourer, 1760-1832: A study in the government of England before the Reform Bill
J. L. (John Lawrence) Hammond
Stripped of their traditional common rights by parliamentary enclosures, English agricultural workers were driven into poverty, criminalized by harsh laws, and met with brutal state repression when they dared to demand a living wage.
Transylvanian Superstitions: From: The Nineteenth Century (Vol. 18), London, July-December 1885, pp. 130-150
E. (Emily) Gerard
A lush landscape of high mountain walls and hidden valleys frames a world where ancient legends dictate every daily chore, calendar day, and rustic encounter.
Twenty-Five Years in the Rifle Brigade
William Surtees
A foot soldier in the Napoleonic Wars observes the madness of European conflict, the mud of Spain, and the costly blunder of New Orleans, writing with modest, eye-level truth.
Two Knapsacks: A Novel of Canadian Summer Life
John Campbell
Two young men hoist their packs for a modest Canadian walking tour, only to find their breezy summer excursion swept into a tangled web of rural intrigue, stolen dogs, regional dialects, and local romance.
U.S. Marine Operations in Korea, 1950-1953, Volume 1 (of 5): The Pusan Perimeter
Lynn Montross
In the summer of 1950, an ill-prepared amphibious force rushed into the rugged Korean peninsula to stop a communist drive that threatened to push United Nations forces into the sea.
A Fantasy of Far Japan
Kencho Suematsu
A window into a culture rapidly reshaping its identity, where ancient codes of honor adapt to the demands of modern global diplomacy.
A history of criticism and literary taste in Europe from the earliest texts to the present day. Volume 2 (of 3), From the Renaissance to the decline of eighteenth century orthodoxy
George Saintsbury
Across three centuries of European thought, readers continuously wrestled with a single question: should modern literature follow ancient rules, or create its own?
An Unsinkable Titanic: Every Ship its own Lifeboat
John Bernard Walker
A fatal compromise between luxury and safety sent the ocean's greatest ship to the Atlantic floor. Naval design must return to forgotten structural principles to prevent such a tragedy from happening again.
Chance: A Tale in Two Parts
Joseph Conrad
When a ruined financier's daughter marries a chivalrous sea captain to escape her misery, her toxic father enters their floating home, turning their voyage into a tense, psychological struggle for survival, love, and truth.
Elizabethan Sonnet-Cycles: Delia - Diana
Henry Constable
A courtly lover transforms unrequited affection into an enduring monument of rhymed devotion, enduring cold disdain while promising his lady timeless artistic immortality.
Glimpses of Japan and Formosa
Harry Alverson Franck
A candid, sharp-eyed travelog captures the frictions and realities of early twentieth-century East Asia, exposing the cultural collision between traditional lives, imperial dominance, and Western observation.
Hildreth's "Japan as It Was and Is": A Handbook of Old Japan, Volume 2 (of 2)
Richard Hildreth
Vast crowds stream along paved imperial highways while foreign observers watch quietly from the closely guarded confines of their prescribed lodgings.
History of the Conquest of Peru: With a Preliminary View of the Civilization of the Incas
William Hickling Prescott
A magnificent civilization is dismantled in a clash of cunning and steel, leaving a newly conquered realm to consume itself in bloody civil feuds.
L'Aiglon
Edmond Rostand
Heir to an empire he is forbidden to rule, a fragile youth in a foreign court wrestles between the towering shadow of his father's conquests and the gilded cage built to keep him harmless.
Letters to Dead Authors
Andrew Lang
Where do dead authors go when the ink dries, and what would a critic say if he could reach across the centuries?
Loss and gain
John Henry Newman
A thoughtful Oxford student wrestles with the shifting doctrines of the nineteenth-century Anglican Church, gradually realizing that his search for genuine religious truth must cost him his quiet academic home and lead him into Catholicism.
Love Poems and Others
D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
When passion meets the limits of human endurance, love becomes both a blazing sanctuary and a battlefield.
Oliver Goldsmith: A Biography
Washington Irving
Unsteady steps, empty pockets, and a genius for affection define a lifetime spent stumbling between destitution and literary immortality.
Pollyanna Grows Up
Eleanor H. (Eleanor Hodgman) Porter
A orphaned young woman whose sunny optimism once transformed a whole town heads off to the city, only to discover that growing up demands a far deeper kind of joy than a child’s cheerful game can offer.
Sintram and His Companions
La Motte-Fouqué, Friedrich Heinrich Karl, Freiherr de
A tormented young knight rides through the frozen valleys of Norway, battling hideous waking nightmares, dark ancestral curses, and the constant, shadowy presence of temptation and death.
Thaumaturgia
Oxonian
A skeptical mind dissects the world's most enduring illusions, tracing how ancient priests, medieval astrologers, and modern quacks exploit human credulity.
The Appetite of Tyranny: Including Letters to an Old Garibaldian
G. K. (Gilbert Keith) Chesterton
A home burns down, but the disaster is not caused by the victims' small vices; it is caused by the arsonist who lit the torch.
The Art of Paper-Making: A Practical Handbook of the Manufacture of Paper from Rags, Esparto, Straw, and Other Fibrous Materials, Including the Manufacture of Pulp from Wood Fibre
Alexander Watt
From the precise sorting of global rags to the chemical secrets of wood pulp and bleaching, nineteenth-century paper manufacture reveals itself as an intricate, rigorous science where industrial innovation transforms crude vegetable fibres into smooth white sheets.
The Barnet Book of Photography: A Collection of Practical Articles
Various
Mastering early photography demands total command over erratic light, treacherous chemical baths, and unyielding glass plates. This 1898 treatise systematically dismantles those technical hurdles, revealing how careful discipline transforms unpredictable chemistry into enduring visual art.
The Breath of Life
John Burroughs
A quiet contemplation on whether the mysteries of biological life can ever be fully measured by physical laws.
The Chemistry of Cookery
W. Mattieu (William Mattieu) Williams
An energetic inquiry into the chemical transformations of the kitchen shows how understanding heat, water, and organic compounds turns cooking from blind routine into a precise, economical science.
The Cultural History of Marlborough, Virginia: An Archeological and Historical Investigation of the Port Town for Stafford County and the Plantation of John Mercer, Including Data Supplied by Frank M. Setzler and Oscar H. Darter
C. Malcolm Watkins
Colonial schemes fade, but soil and shards remain to tell the true history of a failed Virginian port town.