Up From Slavery is the 1901 autobiography of Booker T. Washington detailing his slow and steady rise from a slave child during the Civil War, to the difficulties and obstacles he overcame to get an education at the new Hampton University, to his work establishing vocational schools—most notably the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama—to help black people and other disadvantaged minorities learn useful, marketable skills and work to pull themselves, as a race, up by the bootstraps. He reflects on the generosity of both teachers and philanthropists who helped in educating blacks and native Americans...

This book, all of which has been written at the Front within sound of the German guns and for the most part within shell and rifle range, is an attempt to tell something of the manner of struggle that has gone on for months between the lines along the Western Front, and more especially of what lies behind and goes to the making of those curt and vague terms in the war communiqués. I think that our people at Home will be glad to know more, and ought to know more, of what these bald phrases may actually signify, when, in the other sense, we read 'between the lines.'

The Valley of the Squinting Shadows was the author's first novel and proved controversial. In it, he tells a realistic tale of life in a small Irish town as he saw it, rather than the romanticized version told by others, or how the locals wished to be seen. Mrs. Brennan, the local dressmaker, has opinions. Her son is off studying to become a priest, which elevates him -- and thus her -- in her opinion. Mr. Brennan is forgiven all his transgressions, on account of being father to the son. Mrs. Brennan is less tolerant of those not related to her and her acerbic tongue is well-known throughout the village...

Brooks Adams (1848- 1927), was an American historian and a critic of capitalism. He believed that commercial civilizations rise and fall in predictable cycles. First, masses of people draw together in large population centers and engage in commercial activities. As their desire for wealth grows, they discard spiritual and creative values. Their greed leads to distrust and dishonesty, and eventually the society crumbles. In The Law of Civilisation and Decay (1895), Adams noted that as new population centers emerged in the west, centers of world trade shifted from Constantinople to Venice to Amsterdam to London...

When a bunch of apparently non-practicing Musalmans headed by Mohamed Atta launched that fidayeen attack on New York’s World Trade Centre that Sep 11, the world at large, by then familiar with the ways of the Islamic terrorism, was at a loss to fathom the unthinkable source of that unexpected means of the new Islamist scourge. The symptoms of a latent terrorist in the Muslim youth can be traced to the sublimity of Muhammad's preaching’s in Mecca and the severity of his Medina sermons make Islam a Janus-faced faith that forever bedevils the mind of the Musalmans...

It is a fictional tale of cavalry actions during the U.S. Civil War, under General John Morgan.

This paper takes the reader through the early settlement from 1783 to the modern period of 1888-1912. We see how farming and farm industries developed and how the population was distributed during these times. We see the trends of settlers moving into the Urban centers instead of rural and how the farm industries (making cheese, butter, wool, etc) move off the farm to the city factories. Excerpt: “The farmer’s wife in those days was perhaps the most expert master of trades ever known. She could spin and weave, make a carpet or a rug, dye yarns and clothes, and make a straw hat or a birch broom...