AMERICAN ADVENTURES, A SECOND TRIP ABROAD AT HOMEBY JULIAN STREETCHAPTER IHad my companion and I never crossed the continent together, had we never gone abroad at home, I might have curbed my impatience at the beginning of our second voyage. But from the time we returned from our first journey, after having spent some months in trying, as some one put it, to discover America, I felt the gnawings of excited appetite. The vast sweep of the country continually suggested to me some great delectable repast:...

In Volume III of this series on the Hanoverian Kings, Justin McCarthy is joined by his son, Justin Hartly McCarthy, a liberal Irish MP like his father. Together they bring to life, poor stubborn George III, the outrageous radical, John Wilkes, the rebellious American Colonies, great-hearted Charles James Fox, the Gordon Riots which set London ablaze, Edmund Burke, Britain's problematic Indian policy, and the brave, enigmatic Younger Pitt, who faced national fears of the spread of revolution across the Channel from France and then confronted the imminent threat of invasion by the armies of Napoleon.

Anne Stuart , Queen of England, Scotland, and Ireland, succeeded William III to the throne in 1702. She was the daughter of the deposed Catholic king, James II, but was of the Anglican faith. Liberal, Irish member of Parliament, Justin McCarthy, writing in 1902, creates in sparkling, uncluttered prose a panoramic canvas of Anne and her times. In the first of the two volumes, the brilliant commander, the Duke of Marlborough, defeats the French and Bavarians at the Battle of Blenheim, while the flagship of the admiral of the fleet, Sir Cloudesley Shovell, strikes the rocks near the Isles of Scilly and is lost with all eight hundred hands...

Anne Stuart , Queen of England, Scotland, and Ireland, succeeded William III to the throne in 1702. She was the daughter of the deposed Catholic king, James II, but was of the Anglican faith. Liberal, Irish member of Parliament, Justin McCarthy, writing in 1902, creates in sparkling, uncluttered prose a panoramic canvas of Anne and her times. In the second of the two volumes, McCarthy describes the Battle of Malplaquet, where Marlborough meets the French in "a contest of hand-to-hand fighting on a gigantic scale...

An engaging history of Great Britain in the heyday of Queen Victoria and of her empire by the liberal Irish Member of Parliament, Justin McCarthy. He brings us the larger than life personalities of the day, Victoria and Albert, Russell and Peel, O'Connell and Palmerston, Gladstone and Disraeli, and relates great events, the Afghan War, the Irish famine, and the Crimean War without ever losing sight of the hopes and fears of the common people at home and abroad.

Volume II of this popular history opens in the revolutionary year, 1848, with the Chartist movement for manhood suffrage and with the rise of Young Ireland. Next we join the crowds in 1851 at the opening of the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park, of which Queen Victoria wrote, ''A little rain fell just as we started, but before we came near the Crystal Palace the sun shone and gleamed upon the gigantic edifice, upon which the flags of all nations were floating.'' Hopes for a new era of peace expired in...

Volume III of this history of Victorian Britain begins in 1856 with the gunboat diplomacy of the Second Opium War and then moves to the harrowing days of the Indian Rebellion of 1857. In June 1858, Benjamin Disraeli secures passage of the Jews Relief Act and Baron Lionel Nathan de Rothschild takes his seat in Parliament. Prince Albert dies after a short illness in December 1861, leaving a distraught and cloistered Queen. Lord Palmerston's diplomacy increases Britain's influence on the Continent, while the Civil War in America divides the country in surprising ways. Bismarck emerges and Prussia begins her ascent to power.

The fourth and concluding volume of this history of Victorian Britain opens with the brutal repression in 1865 of a rebellion by ex-slaves in Jamaica. Then in 1867, the Conservative Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli, takes his celebrated "leap in the dark" with the passage of the most comprehensive expansion of manhood suffrage in British history. The Fenian movement agitates unsuccessfully for Irish independence. British trade unions win the right to organize. William Ewart Gladstone launches his great reform ministry by abolishing in Ireland the hated Anglican establishment and follows with a flood of bills reforming education, the British army, and poor relief...

In 1912 textile workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts, mostly immigrants, went on strike in response to a pay cut, speedups, and unsafe working conditions. Representatives from the Industrial Workers of the World came in to help organize the strike. The city declared martial law and a tense standoff went on for weeks. National newspapers provided breathless coverage of the strike and painted drastically different pictures of what was happening and who was to blame. When a woman was shot in ambiguous circumstances, strike leaders were tried for murder--not for shooting her, but for purportedly inciting mob violence leading to her death...

Numerous theories have been proposed for the causes of dancing mania, and it remains unclear whether it was a real illness or a social phenomenon. One of the most prominent theories is that victims suffered from ergot poisoning, which was known as St Anthony’s Fire in the Middle Ages. During floods and damp periods, ergots were able to grow and affect rye and other crops. Ergotism can cause hallucinations, but cannot account for the other strange behaviour most commonly identified with dancing mania...

This work is a scathing criticism of the economic and philosophical arguments of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's The Philosophy of Poverty.

The fourteenth volume of the 15-volume series The World’s Story has a different concept than the previous books edited by Eva March Tappan. This book lists a detailed timeline of important events, starting from the early Eastern cultures till up to recent events from the beginning of the 20th century. The original book was compiled in German by historian Karl Ploetz and translated into English for this series by William H. Tillinghast . - Summary by Sonia

Myths and Legends of the Great Plains is a compendium of myths and legends from the Great Plains region of the US. It includes many short stories, and also quite a few songs and poems. Each tale is tagged with what culture it is from -

"...The preparation of a volume of the quainter, purer myths, suitable for general reading, authentic, and with illustrations of the country portrayed, but with no pretensions to being a purely scientific piece of work.... This volume is intended for popular use." As with most mythologies or religions, these stories tell how the world came to be, how places and peoples got their names, how social customs and mores developed, adventures of the ancestors or gods, and much, much more.

Twenty-three stories of the history of early Oregon plus an appendix: A Brief Summary Of The History Of The Old Oregon Country From Original Sources. OLD OREGON was a mighty sweep of country, and a most romantic one. From the northern border of Mexican California to near Sitka in Russian America it stretched, nearly eight hundred miles. Eastward it stretched over a country of mighty mountain … until the limits of the Oregon country, at the crest of the main range of the Rockies…. The romance ever lingers…...

It is a loss to American literature that so much of the legendary history of these Indian tribes has gone, beyond hope of recovery. Exquisite in color, poetical in feeling, these legends of sun, moon, and stars, of snow, ice, lightning, thunders, the winds, the life of the forest birds and animals about them, and the longing to understand the why and the how of life—all which we have only in fragments…. As in all the other volumes of this series, no effort has been made to ornament or amplify these legends in the effort to make them “literary,” or give them “literary charm...

"In the year 1907, the Woman’s Home Companion commissioned me to go to Russia to write the story of the early days, courtship and marriage of her whom the world knows to-day as the 'Tsaritsa,' The following year, the same periodical sent me to Italy to write a similar account of the life of Queen Elena; and in 1910 I was once more sent abroad, this time to Spain, to learn all about Queen Victoria Eugenie....'Your task is difficult,'remarked a friend to whom I had just explained that I was writing the lives of the Empress of Russia, the Queen of Spain, and the Queen of Italy...

Kellogg Durland spent a year in Russia as a journalist in 1906, during a seminal period in Russian history. This is a highly interesting read, knowing as we do what fell out for Russia in the next decade. The Russian Revolution did not appear from nowhere in 1917. Durland's account shows the rumblings that existed before the explosion.

These Norwegian tales of elemental mountain, forest and sea spirits, have been handed down by hinds and huntsmen, wood choppers and fisher folk. They are men who led a hard and lonely life amid primitive surroundings. The Norwegian Fairy Book has an appeal for one and all, since it is a book in which the mirror of fairy-tale reflects human yearnings and aspirations, human loves, ambitions and disillusionments, in an imaginatively glamored, yet not distorted form. [from the book's preface]

A detailed and exhaustive history of the Norwegian People, written in two volumes. The author, Knut Gjerset, was born in Western Norway in 1865 and immigrated to Chippewa County, Minnesota, in the US with his parents in 1871 and his brother Oluf later got elected to public office there. He received a B.A. in Literature from the University of Minnesota, and also studied at John's Hopkins University from 1895-1896, and the University of Heidelberg, where he was awarded a PhD, from 1896-1898. This first...

L.W. de Laurence, an occult and spiritual author and publisher, not only provides a history of the Tarot for fortune-telling purposes, but writes "a harmony of the meanings which have been attached to the various cards." De Laurence also offers a simple method for divinatory work with the cards, as opposed to the "cumbrous and involved" handbooks of the day.

As a girl, Lady Duff-Gordon was noted both for her beauty and intelligence. As an author, she is most famous for this collection of letters from Egypt. Lady Duff-Gordon had tuberculosis, and went to Egypt for her health. This collection of her personal letters to her mother and her husband. By all accounts everyone loved her, and the letters are very personal in style and content. The letters are as much an introduction to her person as a record of her life on the Upper Nile.

Lady Sarah Isabella Augusta Wilson was the aunt of Winston Spencer Churchill. In 1899 she became the first woman war correspondent when she was recruited to cover the Siege of Mafeking for the Daily Mail during the Boer War. She moved to Mafeking with her husband at the start of the war, where he was aide-de-camp to Colonel Robert Baden-Powell. Baden-Powell asked her to leave Mafeking for her own safety after the Boers threatened to storm the British garrison. This she duly did, and set off on a...

This collection of 14 stories collected by Lafcadio Hearn, contains Japanese ghost stories, but also several non-fiction pieces. Hearn tries to give a glimpse into the customs of the Japanese, by giving examples of Buddhist Proverbs and explaining the use of incense and the nation wide fascination with poetry. Furthermore, he has again translated several hair-rising ghost stories, like "A Passional Karma" about the truly undying love of a young couple.

Greece-born Lafcadio Hearn (1850 - 1904) spent decades of his life in Japan, even marrying a Japanese woman, thus becoming a Japanese citizen by the name of Koizumi Yakumo (小泉 八雲). He wrote many books on Japan, especially about its folklore. In this posthumously published book, he takes a closer look at Japan's religious history: How it developed from ancient beliefs into Shintoism, resisted suppression attempts by both Buddhism and Christianity and how – despite efforts to westernise Japan during the era known as Meiji Restoration – it remained the basis for Japanese society...

Lafcadio Hearn was one of the first Westerners to live in Japan during the early Meiji era, and a prolific writer. Although chiefly known for his collections of Japanese ghost stories , he also wrote many non-fiction essays about his life in Japan. This book contains 11 essays covering a variety of topics. For example, Hearn writes about his visits to Kyoto and Osaka, Japanese art, as well as Buddhism and Nirvana. Prooflisteners for this book were Isana and Margot.

Imagine a young, twenty-something woman in 1860, reared “in the indolent life of the ordinary Southern girl” (which means she has never learned to cook); married to a professional man who knows “nothing of manual labor;” who is mother to a young son; and who has just found out she is pregnant with their second child. Imagine that this couple has become “embarrassed financially” by “imprudent speculations,” and that they are discussing what to do. They decide to buy a wagon and three yoke of unbroke oxen and head overland to California...