Volume One of the New and Complete Newgate Calendar, covering the years 1700 through 1723, relates stories of British trials, the persons accused and the crimes committed. It is primarily based upon contemporary newspaper and pamphlet accounts of these trials. Where the criminal is particularly well known, such as the highwayman, burglar and escape artist Jack Sheppard, other sources were used as well. The readings used here are selected to illustrate different aspects of the eighteenth century criminal world and the British legal system.

Marie Curie, born in Warsaw in 1867, was a French physicist and chemist famous for her work on radioactivity. She was a pioneer in the field of radioactivity and the first person honored with two Nobel Prizes - in physics (1903) and chemistry (1911). The risks of working with strongly radioactive materials were not known at that time, and she eventually died in 1934 from an illness likely caused by radiation poisoning.Radioactive Substances is the thesis of Marie Curie, presented to the Faculté de Sciences de Paris in 1903, and subsequently published in "Chemical News" vol 88, 1903...

“Society lies under the spell of ancient terrorism and coagulated errors. Science is either wilfully hypocritical or radically misinformed.” John Addington Symonds struck many an heroic note in this courageous (albeit anonymously circulated) essay. He is a worthy Virgil guiding the reader through the Inferno of suffering which emerging medico-legal definitions of the sexually deviant were prepared to inflict on his century and on the one which followed. Symonds pleads for sane human values in...

An American heiress nicknamed the Manitou Princess (after her daddy’s richest silver mine) is devastated to find that her fiancé only loves her money, so she does what anyone might do: she bolts for Europe, dons male attire and sets out on a walking tour of the Alps, passing as a teenage boy. Though professing hatred of all men, she soon falls in with a just-jilted English lord, aptly named Monty Lane, who is attempting to walk off a broken heart of his own. The Princess Passes presents the ups and downs of their alpine relationship through the unpenetrating eyes of Lord Lane...

Everybody makes mistakes, and everything has a price. This novel describes, according to it's name, the life of Adeline Mowbray, full of everything: sorrow, happiness, falsehood, truth, kindness, and mistakes. This novel is an exploration of the human heart. Be prepaired for a strong and enjoyable read.

Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish captain in the French Army was court martialed in 1894 on a trumped up charge of treason and condemned to life imprisonment on Devil’s island, a penal colony off French Guiana. His prison diary, published as Five Years of My Life in 1901 is a heroic tale of survival against daunting odds: isolation, deprivation, torture . . Alfred left behind in Paris his wife Lucie, who, forbidden to join her husband in exile, struggled to protect their two children from the rampant anti-Semitism that swirled about them, while she begged her husband to hold onto life as she tried to clear his name...

The reader cannot but smile at some of the phases of life presented in this volume. Yet the smile will, in no case, the author thinks, be at the expense of humanity, good feeling, or virtue. Many of the incidents given, are facts embellished by a few touches of fancy. In all, lessons may be read that some, at least, will do well to lay to heart.