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34,239 public-domain books, summarised. Page 223 of 714.

Atlantic Classics, Second Series
Unknown
The everyday observation of an era becomes the enduring wisdom of the next when caught by reflective minds. These collected voices from early twentieth-century America turn personal experience into quiet philosophy.

Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Exeter: A Description of Its Fabric and a Brief History of the Episcopal See
Percy Addleshaw
Rising above ancient stone walls, a majestic monument of faith and genius reveals how centuries of ambitious prelates transformed raw Devonshire masonry into a single, breathtaking masterpiece of Decorated Gothic architecture.

Big Game Shooting, volume 2 (of 2)
Clive Phillipps-Wolley
Tracking a phantom beast through dense pine ravines demands absolute stillness, deep patience, and an appetite for cold terrain.

Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine
Various
A lively mix of intellectual critique, historic narrative, high romance, and social satire gives voice to nineteenth-century British literary culture.

Castilian Days
John Hay
A nineteenth-century American diplomat paints a vivid, clear-eyed portrait of Spain, where ancient traditions, glorious art, and stubborn pride collide with the dawn of modern politics.

Catalogue of Violent and Destructive Earthquakes in the Philippines: With an Appendix: Earthquakes in the Marianas Islands 1599-1909
Miguel Saderra Masó
A precise, tabulated inventory of seismic disasters tracks centuries of ground-shattering events, detailing how structural ambition and tectonic vulnerability shaped the physical history of the Pacific islands.

Clarissa Harlowe; or the history of a young lady
Samuel Richardson
A young woman seeks to preserve her moral independence against an overbearing family and a relentless, scheming suitor.

Dante and the early astronomers
M. A. (Mary Acworth) Orr
Before modern observatories shattered the ancient skies, human beings measured time by shadow poles and mapped their cosmos in fixed nested spheres. To understand how Dante Alighieri wove this early cosmos into poetry, an astronomer turns her gaze back to the origins of stargazing.

Despoilers of the Golden Empire
Randall Garrett
A ruthless commander leads a starveling expedition into an alien jungle, risking everything to wrench the universe's most precious power metal from a fierce, sun-worshipping empire.

Drake's Road Book of the Grand Junction Railway: from Birmingham to Liverpool and Manchester
Drake, James, active 1825
A journey through the heart of early industrial Britain shows how steam, steel, and speed reshaped a nation's landscape and daily life.

Far to seek
Maud Diver
A young man born of an English father and an Indian mother sets out for his mother’s homeland to bridge two worlds, only to find both sides torn by political unrest and the quiet weight of expectation.

Furnishing the Home of Good Taste: A Brief Sketch of the Period Styles in Interior Decoration with Suggestions as to Their Employment in the Homes of Today
Lucy Abbot Throop
Good design is not an accident of luxury, but the deliberate alignment of utility, history, and restraint.

Graded Lessons in English: An Elementary English Grammar Consisting of One Hundred Practical Lessons, Carefully Graded and Adapted to the Class-Room
Alonzo Reed
A systematic, hundred-part guide to English structure, this work transforms the abstract rules of grammar into a hands-on mechanical discipline. It remains a definitive artifact of the nineteenth-century classroom’s rigorous approach to language.

Gulliver of Mars
Edwin Lester Arnold
A disillusioned American navy officer travels across space to an ancient, decaying Mars, where he fights savage conquerors and falls in love with a fleeting alien princess.

History of the English People, Volume I: Early England, 449-1071
John Richard Green
An island nation is born not in isolation, but through successive waves of conquest, assimilation, and institutional struggle.

History of the Expedition under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clark, Vol. 1.: To the Sources of the Missouri, Thence Across the Rocky Mountains and Down the River Columbia to the Pacific Ocean. Performed During the Years 1804-5-6
Meriwether Lewis
In the spring of 1804, a small contingent of soldiers and boatmen rowed up the Missouri River into an unmapped continent. This volume records their daily struggle against swift currents, harsh weather, and the sheer immensity of the American West.

Humanity in the City
E. H. (Edwin Hubbell) Chapin
Under the rushing noise and blinding display of urban commerce lies a single human soul, searching in crowded thoroughfares for the divine purpose of its daily struggles.

Jerry Todd and the Oak Island Treasure
Leo Edwards
A midnight escape on a stolen clay scow, a disguised piano leg, and a band of small-town boys facing down a ruthless criminal bring this classic midwestern adventure to life.

Life of Joseph Brant—Thayendanegea (Vol. II): Including the Border Wars of the American Revolution and Sketches of the Indian Campaigns of Generals Harmar, St. Clair, and Wayne
William L. (William Leete) Stone
Framed as both a sweeping military chronicle and a granular biography, this history explores the volatile frontier of the American Revolution and its complicated aftermath. Through the life of the Mohawk leader Thayendanegea, it traces the collision of empire, indigenous sovereignty, and nation-building.

Macbeth
William Shakespeare
A tragic tale of ambition, betrayal, and the supernatural, exploring the consequences of unchecked desire.

Maurice Tiernay, Soldier of Fortune
Charles Lever
An orphaned street boy navigates the blood-soaked chaos of Revolutionary France, forging a perilous career as an opportunistic soldier across the battlefields and battlements of Napoleonic Europe.

Memorials of old Nottinghamshire
Unknown
A landscape of ancient oaks, stone spires, and shifting riverbeds holds the memory of a county's forgotten craftsmen and sudden wars.

One Woman's Life
Robert Herrick
A young woman navigates the shifting social currents of turn-of-the-century America, discovering that beauty and personal ambition carry unexpected costs.

Personal Poems, Complete: Volume IV of The Works of John Greenleaf Whittier
John Greenleaf Whittier
Faithful memory, moral duty, and quiet spiritual reflection weave through a lifetime of verse to form a portrait of nineteenth-century New England.

Posthumous Works of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
Mary Wollstonecraft
A woman in an eighteenth-century asylum writes her life down for the child taken from her arms, using ink and memory to resist her own undoing.

Selections From Josephus
Flavius Josephus
A ancient nation's struggle for identity ends in devastating ruin under the absolute power of imperial Rome.

Shackleton's Last Voyage: The Story of the Quest
Frank Wild
A leader’s sudden passing in icy waters leaves an expedition without its guiding star, forcing a resilient crew to press onward through the Antarctic pack.

Shakespeare's environment
C. C. (Charlotte Carmichael) Stopes
Reconstructing the living world of Renaissance Warwickshire and London requires unearthing the legal disputes, property transactions, and domestic records of a poet's contemporaries.

Successful Methods of Public Speaking
Grenville Kleiser
To captivate an audience, a speaker must bring a message deeply rooted in personal conviction, relying far more on earnest character and quiet sincerity than on mere mechanical artifice.

The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume 2 (of 3): The Belief Among the Polynesians
James George Frazer
Across the islands of the Pacific, the fear of the dead built stone pyramids, dictated daily law, and demanded human lives to keep the living safe.

The collected works of Henrik Ibsen, Vol. 08 (of 11)
Henrik Ibsen
When truth is treated as a crime and illusions are kept alive like pet birds in an attic, survival requires choosing between comfortable lies and devastating honesty.

The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizens
Georg Jellinek
A rigorous historical inquiry traces the origins of modern fundamental rights to colonial American religious compacts rather than the French Enlightenment.

The Discoveries of America to the Year 1525
Arthur James Weise
Centuries before European anchors bit into American shores, stories of distant lands across the western sea circulated through global history, setting off an relentless pursuit of unknown territories.

The Duke Decides
Headon Hill
A penniless young nobleman, trapped by a criminal syndicate in New York, inherits a British dukedom only to find his new fortune used as leverage to force him into a high-stakes international robbery.

The English Novel and the Principle of its Development
Sidney Lanier
Tracing the evolution of literary form from ancient myth to modern realism, a passionate nineteenth-century scholar reveals how prose grew into the supreme art of human personality.

The History of England from the First Invasion by the Romans to the Accession of King George the Fifth. Volume 08 of 11
Hilaire Belloc
The standard of historical narrative in the English language was changed when John Lingard and Hilaire Belloc combined rigorous archival evidence with a sweeping, unsparing narrative of the English Civil War and its aftermath.

The History of Napoleon Buonaparte
J. G. (John Gibson) Lockhart
A ruthless ambition propels a Corsican officer from complete obscurity to the master of continental Europe, only for his vast empire to collapse under the weight of its own excess.

The Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France
Charles Duke Yonge
A tragic trajectory across the divide of revolution transforms a naive Austrian princess into an enduring, embattled symbol of fallen royalty.

The Man-Made World
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
A century of history has been mistaken for human nature because half the race was forbidden to shape it.

The Ordeal of Richard Feverel
George Meredith
A father’s rigid design for a perfect son collides with human nature, launching a devastating chain of secret passions, misguided interferences, and tragic miscalculations.

The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, v. 2 (of 2)
Charles Dickens
A bumbling, warm-hearted gentleman and his quick-witted servant navigate the legal traps, debtor prisons, and tangled romances of nineteenth-century England.

The Sick-a-Bed Lady: And Also Hickory Dock, The Very Tired Girl, The Happy-Day, Something That Happened in October, The Amateur Lover, Heart of The City, The Pink Sash, Woman's Only Business
Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
A restless, spirited collection of tales where fragile health and intense, impulsive emotions collide, capturing the poignant search for connection in a world that often feels indifferent or alarmingly small.

The Wonders of Instinct: Chapters in the Psychology of Insects
Jean-Henri Fabre
Tiny lives play out against a dusty background in Southern France, where small creatures hunt, build, and scheme. By observing their daily routines, a patient naturalist reveals the complex and mysterious instincts guiding their quiet worlds.

Tom Cringle's Log
Michael Scott
An eager thirteen-year-old midshipman sets sail into the high-stakes, powder-charred waters of the West Indies during the Napoleonic Wars, coming of age amidst roaring sea battles, tropical fevers, privateers, and the vibrant, unpredictable life of the Caribbean.

Travels in South Kensington: with Notes on Decorative Art and Architecture in England
Moncure Daniel Conway
Against the backdrop of Victorian industrialization, a quiet revolution takes shape through glittering majolica, hand-loomed carpets, and thoughtfully built suburban homes that bring art into everyday human life.

A History of the Third French Republic
C. H. C. (Charles Henry Conrad) Wright
A nation rebuilds itself from catastrophic defeat, balancing fragile democratic ideals against intense political rivalry and deep social fractures.

A New Light of Alchymie: Taken out of the Fountaine of Nature, and Manuall Experience. Etc
Michal Sedziwój
A central document of early modern science, this work unveils nature’s hidden machinery, guiding readers through the subterranean generation of metals, the spiritual chemistry of the elements, and the elusive art of transmutation.

Aphorisms and Reflections from the Works of T. H. Huxley
Thomas Henry Huxley
A relentless commitment to clear thinking can strip away comforting illusions and reveal the rigorous, unified order of the natural world.