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34,239 public-domain books, summarised. Page 493 of 714.

The Squatter's Dream: A Story of Australian Life
Rolf Boldrewood
The restless pursuit of fortune across the Australian wilderness leads a young man toward both spectacular success and devastating ruin. This narrative charts the high-stakes gamble of colonial life, where nature, markets, and human greed collide.

The Strand Magazine, Vol. 05, Issue 28, April 1893: An Illustrated Monthly
Various
This collection serves as a vibrant time capsule, offering a window into the varied curiosities, anxieties, and entertainments that occupied the Victorian public at the height of the fin de siècle. It captures the era's dual appetite for serious reportage and imaginative storytelling, grounding the reader in a…

The strange career of the Chevalier d'Eon de Beaumont
J. Buchan (John Buchan) Telfer
The life of the Chevalier d'Eon remains one of history’s most baffling puzzles, weaving together international espionage, high-stakes diplomacy, and the enigma of a shifting identity.

The True Story of the American Flag
John Henry Fow
This rigorous historical investigation dismantles the enduring American myth that Betsy Ross designed the first national flag, favoring instead an analysis of verifiable naval records and archival evidence.

The Women's Victory—and After: Personal Reminiscences, 1911-1918
Fawcett, Millicent Garrett, Dame
The hard-won enfranchisement of British women is chronicled here by a central leader of the movement, tracing the shift from bitter parliamentary defeat to the final, necessary victory of 1918.

Through Colonial Doorways
Anne Hollingsworth Wharton
This collection of essays serves as an intimate guide to the social and domestic landscape of late 18th-century America, focusing primarily on the refined circles of Philadelphia and New York. By peeling back the layers of formal history, it reveals the human side of the Revolutionary era through the private…

Tracked by a Tattoo: A Mystery
Fergus Hume
A labyrinthine murder mystery set in late Victorian London, where a detective follows a trail of hidden identities and poisoned needles to uncover a dark family secret.

Under Sail
Lincoln Colcord
The sea is a mirror for the human soul, reflecting the same intricate patterns of longing, honor, and madness that govern life on land. These stories capture the quiet intensity of men bound to the water and the ghosts they carry with them.

Vignettes of San Francisco
Almira Morey
This collection of evocative prose sketches captures the spirit of a city caught between its frontier heritage and the dawn of the machine age. With a keen eye for the peculiar, the author maps the soul of San Francisco through its bustling markets, fog-drenched mornings, and the quiet dignity of its diverse…

Villa Elsa: A Story of German Family Life
Stuart Oliver Henry
The path to true peace lies not in treaties or armaments, but in the intimate, lived experience of foreign cultures. Only through the cross-pollination of national values can the world hope to bridge the deep, often violent, divide separating the German character from the rest of humanity.

Walking-Stick Papers
Robert Cortes Holliday
A wandering, inquisitive mind captures the small, overlooked curiosities of daily life in these lighthearted, observant essays. They transform the mundane—a walk down the street or a stroll past a shop window—into a deliberate, meditative art.

War-Time Financial Problems
Hartley Withers
London’s financial prestige faced unprecedented strain as the world conflict reshaped the global economy. This analysis examines the methods used to fund a total war and the precarious path toward postwar recovery.

Wyn's Camping Days
Amy Bell Marlowe
A spirited group of friends swaps the comforts of home for the challenges of the wild, proving that independence and teamwork are the best tools for navigating both the lake and the local social scene.

A First Year in Canterbury Settlement
Samuel Butler
A young man leaves the comforts of Victorian England to seek his fortune as a sheep farmer in the rugged, untamed wilderness of New Zealand.

A Mere Accident
George Moore
The quiet hills of Sussex become a stage for a young man’s collision between his aesthetic devotion to the past and the intrusive, violent demands of the present.

A Midsummer Holiday and Other Poems
Algernon Charles Swinburne
The sea, the child, and the song are the three pillars that hold up this vast, rhythmic exploration of the natural world and the human spirit. It is a work of deep, rolling music, capturing a mind at once reverent toward the masters of the past and fiercely defiant of the rigid hierarchies of its own day.

A New Subspecies of Wood Rat (Neotoma mexicana) from Colorado
Robert B. Finley
This technical monograph identifies a previously unrecognized subspecies of wood rat inhabiting the canyonlands of southeastern Colorado, providing a definitive record for mammalogists and regional naturalists.

A practical course in botany
Eliza Frances Andrews
This comprehensive manual serves as a bridge between the rigorous requirements of early twentieth-century college botany and the practical, daily realities of agriculture and home life. By emphasizing the functional and economic roles of plants, it encourages students to move beyond passive observation,…

A way of life
Osler, William, Sir
Living for the day alone, this quiet philosophy offers a practical framework for steadying the mind, silencing the ghosts of yesterday, and abandoning the paralyzing anxieties of tomorrow. It is a simple, enduring guide for navigating the inevitable stresses of a busy life.

A Woman Intervenes
Robert Barr
A headstrong journalist and a pragmatic mineralogist collide on a transatlantic voyage, setting off a high-stakes competition for control of a Canadian mine.

Adventures of the Comte de la Muette during the Reign of Terror
Bernard Capes
A fugitive aristocrat navigates the lethal absurdity of the French Revolution, clinging to his wits and a newfound love while dodging the shadow of the guillotine. This atmospheric tale captures the erratic, nightmarish rhythm of survival in a world turned upside down.

All About Your Canary
George Jackson French
A practical guide for the mid-century home, this manual serves as both an instructional handbook for canary care and a catalog of the era’s most prized avian varieties. It blends straightforward husbandry advice with the gentle encouragement of a hobbyist.

Antoine of Oregon: A Story of the Oregon Trail
James Otis
A young guide leads a party of settlers on a perilous five-month journey across the vast American wilderness to reach the promised land of Oregon.

Ariel: A Shelley Romance
André Maurois
A brilliant and volatile spirit caught in the friction of his own ideals, a young poet navigates the brutal conventions of the nineteenth century. This portrait captures the luminous, often tragic intersection of genius and ordinary human frailty.

Arminell: A Social Romance, Vol. 1
S. (Sabine) Baring-Gould
The rigid hierarchies of the Victorian countryside begin to buckle when a young woman of privilege discovers a secret that threatens to dissolve the distinction between the gentry and the rural poor.

Beside Still Waters
Arthur Christopher Benson
Seeking a life of quiet reflection, one man turns away from the demands of the world to discover his own path. This meditation on personal growth and the pursuit of happiness remains a gentle guide for the introspective.

Birds and All Nature, Vol 7, No. 3, March 1900: Illustrated by Color Photography
Various
This collection of nature writing and miscellany captures the inquisitive, moralizing spirit of turn-of-the-century natural history through vibrant color photography and earnest prose. It serves as both a field guide and a cultural repository for an era fascinated by the natural world’s intersection with human ethics.

Britain at Bay
Spenser Wilkinson
This is a stark, urgent call for the complete reorganization of the British state to meet the existential threat posed by a rising Germany. It argues that a nation that prioritizes party politics over national readiness is already halfway to defeat.

British Highways and Byways from a Motor Car: Being a Record of a Five Thousand Mile Tour in England, Wales and Scotland
Thos. D. (Thomas Dowler) Murphy
A five-thousand-mile motoring odyssey through Britain’s hidden corners captures the landscape of 1908, offering a vibrant, gas-lit glimpse of an era when the automobile was still a daring way to bridge the past and present.

"Chinkie's Flat": 1904
Louis Becke
In the harsh, sun-drenched frontier of 1904 Queensland, a struggling mining camp finds new life through the grit of a determined prospector and the sudden arrival of an independent young woman.

Christianity and Islam
Carl Heinrich Becker
Far from being alien forces, Christianity and Islam share a deeply intertwined history, rooted in the same medieval intellectual soil and forged through centuries of mutual influence.

Clinical Investigations on Squint
C. Schweigger
Strabismus is more than a mere visual misalignment; it is a complex physiological puzzle that demands a rigorous departure from dogma in favor of empirical observation.

Collectors' Items: Fifty Superb Recipes from Spice Islands
Spice Islands Company
Elevating the home kitchen through the precise application of curated seasonings, these recipes invite the cook to treat flavor as a deliberate, refined art. This collection serves as a portal to an era of culinary sophistication, where pantry staples are transformed into global delicacies.

Criminals
George Middleton
A newlywed bride flees her hotel on her wedding night, returning to her parents' home in a state of traumatized shock. Her sudden arrival forces three people to confront the dangerous silence surrounding the realities of marriage.

Daisy's Necklace, and What Came of It
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
This work is a spirited, unconventional literary episode that blends a sentimental, Victorian-era tale of mystery and family secrets with a self-aware, satirical commentary on the act of writing itself. It serves as both a story of lost identities and a playful deconstruction of the publishing industry.

Democritus Platonissans
Henry More
A striking philosophical vision, this work argues for an infinite universe populated by countless worlds, reconciling vast cosmological freedom with a deeply personal commitment to the divine.

Diddie, Dumps, and Tot
Louise Clarke Pyrnelle
Set on a Southern plantation during the antebellum era, this narrative follows three sisters and their interactions with the enslaved community, preserving the stories, games, and folklore of a vanished way of life.

Dynevor Terrace
Charlotte M. (Charlotte Mary) Yonge
A young man of idealistic temperament and a dutiful, high-minded woman navigate the crushing weight of family expectations, pride, and poverty. Their journey from stifling social obligations to personal integrity defines this mid-nineteenth-century domestic drama.

Earthwork out of Tuscany: Being Impressions and Translations of Maurice Hewlett
Maurice Hewlett
The Renaissance lives as a breathing, human landscape where the spirit of the past and the beauty of the present entwine. Through the eyes of a wanderer, ancient art and modern life reveal their shared, eternal pulse.

English Songs and Ballads
Unknown
These verses capture the heartbeat of a nation’s history, collecting the poems and songs that define the English spirit through love, loss, war, and the quiet rhythms of the countryside. It is a mosaic of voices ranging from anonymous medieval lyrics to the polished stanzas of nineteenth-century masters.

Fairy Fingers: A Novel
Anna Cora Ogden Mowatt Ritchie
A noble French family’s financial collapse forces an exiled heiress into the trade of dressmaking, setting up a clash between aristocratic pride and self-made independence.

Fifteen years in hell
Luther Benson
The path to ruin is often paved with small, seemingly innocuous choices, yet for some, the descent is swifter and more absolute than the world can comprehend.

Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World. Part 1
Mark Twain
A world-traveling lecture tour becomes a sprawling, irreverent meditation on the absurdities of human belief, the failures of colonial ambition, and the strange, stubborn persistence of the traveler’s own bad habits.

Food Habits of the Thrushes of the United States
F. E. L. (Foster Ellenborough Lascelles) Beal
This is a meticulous, data-driven report detailing exactly what American thrushes consume to survive. It offers a fascinating, granular look at the intersection of avian biology and agricultural interests in the early 20th century.

Four Girls at Chautauqua
Pansy
Four young women embark on a summer journey to a forest camp meeting, unaware that the experience will fundamentally alter their personal beliefs and the direction of their lives.

Guy in the Jungle
William Murray Graydon
Duty calls in the dark of a London fog, pulling a young officer away from his peaceful life and into a perilous world of desert intrigue and hidden subterranean mysteries.

Hawaii National Park: A Guide for the Haleakala Section, Island of Maui, Hawaii
George Cornelius Ruhle
The summit of Haleakala, an immense volcanic landscape on the island of Maui, serves as both a sanctuary for rare, ancient life and a testament to the powerful geological forces that shaped the Hawaiian archipelago.

History of flagellation among different nations
Unknown
The history of human correction is a long and often brutal one, spanning from the ancient Roman arena to the private chambers of the pious and the powerful.