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Biographies — page 21
2,466 public-domain biographies books, summarised. Page 21 of 52.
The Women of Mormondom
Edward W. (Edward William) Tullidge
Persecuted, exiled, and misunderstood, the female pioneers of early Mormonism built an empire in the desert while establishing a radical spiritual vision of female authority.
Alice, grand duchess of Hesse, princess of Great Britain and Ireland: Biographical sketch and letters. With portrait
Alice, Grand Duchess, consort of Ludwig IV, Grand Duke of Hesse-Darmstadt
Behind official court gazettes and royal portraits lies the private life of a British princess navigating war, loss, and public duty in her adopted German homeland.
Malthus and his work
James Bonar
Human populations expand at a geometric rate, but their food supply grows only in simple arithmetical steps, trapping societies in a endless cycle of scarcity.
Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume 4 (of 10)
J. G. (John Gibson) Lockhart
Navigating a high-stakes financial crisis, a beloved poet rejects official crowns, sails the rugged northern seas, and quietly publishes the book that changes prose fiction forever.
Personal Recollections of a Cavalryman: With Custer's Michigan Cavalry Brigade in the Civil War
James Harvey Kidd
A firsthand account of the Michigan Cavalry Brigade's Civil War campaigns, offering a vivid portrayal of life on the front lines.
The Story of Geronimo
Jim Kjelgaard
A young Apache boy watches from the high grass, learning how to steal horses, hunt deer, and outwit enemy trackers. From these quiet beginnings rises a legendary war leader whose name will echo across the Southwest.
Wallace
active 1470-1492 Blind Hary
A long-lost leader rises from the ashes of a conquered kingdom to wage relentless, bloody guerrilla warfare against an occupying English tyrant.
A Day with Keats
May Byron
A fragile young poet paces a sunlit Hampstead garden, transforming his inner turmoil and devotion into immortal verse.
Akbar, Emperor of India: A Picture of Life and Customs from the Sixteenth Century
Richard Garbe
A visionary sixteenth-century ruler transforms a fractured realm into a unified empire through radical tolerance, administrative genius, and unyielding personal courage.
Personal reminiscences of Henry Irving
Bram Stoker
Behind the velvet curtain of nineteenth-century theatre stood a towering figure of artistic ambition, seen not from the auditorium, but through the eyes of the man who managed his world.
The Autobiography of Sergeant William Lawrence: A Hero of the Peninsular and Waterloo Campaigns
William Lawrence
A young runaway tradesman enlists for a sixteen-guinea bounty and spent seventeen years in the ranks, marching across Spain, France, and Flanders straight into the fury of Waterloo.
An Enquiry into the Life and Legend of Michael Scot
J. Wood (James Wood) Brown
To separate a thirteenth-century scholar’s genuine scientific achievements from the dark, persistent myths of medieval magic, an investigator must carefully trace surviving manuscripts through European cloisters, royal courts, and monastic libraries.
Alexander the Great: Makers of History
Jacob Abbott
A young prince tames an unmanageable warhorse, inherits an empire before his prime, and leads a disciplined army across continents to tear down the power of Persia.
Captain John Smith
Charles Dudley Warner
A clear-eyed, witty debunking of America’s favorite tall-tale hero, this volume strips away centuries of romance to reveal the real, deeply flawed, yet endlessly fascinating human being beneath the myth.
Diplomatic Days
Edith O'Shaughnessy
A young diplomat's wife arrives in Mexico City just as a thirty-year dictatorship crumbles, witnessing a delicate social world unraveling against the backdrop of impending revolution.
Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, No. 15, August, 1851
Various
A vibrant mid-nineteenth-century repository of high narrative, global travelogue, domestic comedy, and contemporary news, offering an expansive mirror of Victorian public taste.
The Diary of a U-boat Commander: With an Introduction and Explanatory Notes by Etienne
King-Hall, Stephen, Sir
Beneath the cold steel of the Imperial German Navy lies a fragile heart, torn between fanatical duty, harrowing undersea warfare, and an agonizingly fatal romance.
The Life of William Carey, Shoemaker & Missionary
George Smith
A rural cobbler with an unquenchable gift for languages transforms himself into the pioneer of modern Asian missions, translating ancient texts and reshaping nineteenth-century Bengal.
The Most Ancient Lives of Saint Patrick: Including the Life by Jocelin, Hitherto Unpublished in America, and His Extant Writings
Unknown
A young captive breaks his chains to transform an entire island, forging a national faith through miraculous encounters, unyielding devotion, and stubborn, enduring love for a foreign shore.
There was once a slave
Shirley Graham Du Bois
A boy born into chattel slavery looks up at the northern stars and decides that his mind, his body, and his destiny belong to no man.
Alcuin of York
G. F. (George Forrest) Browne
Through a detailed examination of early medieval manuscripts, letters, and council records, an English scholar traces the profound impact of Anglo-Saxon learning on the intellectual and ecclesiastical foundation of Continental Europe.
Dickens
Ward, Adolphus William, Sir
The energetic spirit of the nineteenth century’s greatest storyteller finds here a measured, thoughtful portrait, revealing the man behind the legendary library of characters. It is an enduring examination of artistic genius struggling with the personal weight of fame.
The Boys' Life of Abraham Lincoln
Helen Nicolay
A quiet pioneer lineage gives rise to an extraordinary American life, forged in backwoods labor and tested by national catastrophe.
The Boys of '61
Charles Carleton Coffin
A front-line reporter watches the American republic fracture and rebuild itself through four years of relentless fire, recording the mud, blood, and quiet human courage that defined a nation's fiercest struggle.
The Eulogy of Richard Jefferies
Walter Besant
An early death cut short a life of quiet observation, but a fellow writer stepped forward to record the singular spirit and solitary vision that transformed English nature writing into visionary art.
Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, Vol. 2 (of 2)
Dorothy Wordsworth
Sharp mountain air, rugged glens, and quiet encounters fill an observant traveller's notebook. Everyday moments of nineteenth-century journeys come alive through exact observation, unhurried prose, and a profound eye for landscape and human dignity.
My Airships
Alberto Santos-Dumont
Before humanity mastered the skies, a single Brazilian inventor proved that a powered balloon could be steered above Paris.
Caudebec in America
William Louis Cuddeback
A coat of arms with blue fields and silver smelts marks the ancient French origins of a family whose branches spread across three centuries of American wilderness, river valleys, and expanding frontiers.
General Gatacre: The Story of the Life and Services of Sir William Forbes Gatacre, K.C.B., D.S.O., 1843-1906
Gatacre, Beatrix Wickens Davey, Lady
A career of relentless activity and selfless devotion ends in sudden military disgrace and exile. Written by his widow to vindicate his name, this biography traces a soldier's journey across the British Empire.
Great Singers, Second Series: Malibran To Titiens
George T. (George Titus) Ferris
A vivid gallery of nineteenth-century opera stars portrays the triumphs, personal sacrifices, and relentless drive behind the golden age of European lyric theater.
Maria Mitchell: Life, Letters, and Journals
Maria Mitchell
Stargazing through a modest telescope on a Nantucket roof, a quiet librarian spots a faint, unknown blur—and unexpectedly steps onto the world stage of nineteenth-century science.
The Life of the Truly Eminent and Learned Hugo Grotius: Containing a Copious and Circumstantial History of the Several Important and Honourable Negotiations in Which He Was Employed
M. de (Jean Lévesque) Burigny
A brilliant mind navigating the shipwreck of seventeen-century statecraft finds no easy harbor between religious dogmatism and political exile.
Auld lang syne. Second series
F. Max (Friedrich Max) Müller
An eminent nineteenth-century Oxford philologist reflects on a lifetime spent bridge-building between European scholarship and Indian thought. Through warm, highly personal portraits of Eastern thinkers, reformers, and scholars, he reveals how ancient Sanskrit texts reshape modern ideas about faith, human nature,…
Frederick Douglass
Booker T. Washington
A slave builds a mind, buys a life, and turns a nation's defining conflict into an irresistible moral campaign.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
Biographies of distinguished scientific men. First series
F. (François) Arago
Through personal peril, political upheaval, and rigorous observation, a pioneering French astronomer illuminates the human drama behind scientific discovery, revealing that the march of knowledge relies as much on personal character as on mathematical genius.
The Strand Magazine, Vol. 27, Issue 160, April, 1904
Various
A world of Edwardian wonder unfolds in a legendary magazine where brilliant detectives, world-famous actresses, and magical golden birds share space with sea captains and strange hidden valleys.
Voyages of Samuel De Champlain
Samuel de Champlain
Driven by commercial ambition, royal diplomacy, and raw geographic curiosity, a French cartographer treks through the icy rivers and dense forests of eastern North America, charting a wilderness that refuses to yield easily.
A Book of Quaker Saints
L. V. (Lucy Violet) Hodgkin
Ordinary men and women, driven by an inner light, transform cruelty into peaceful redemption across centuries of quiet, revolutionary faith.
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.
Selections From Josephus
Flavius Josephus
A ancient nation's struggle for identity ends in devastating ruin under the absolute power of imperial Rome.
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.