Queen Elizabeth the First of England, the Grand Turk at Constantinople, and an organ builder named Thomas Dallam—quite a trio. In 1599, Elizabeth commanded master organ builder Dallam to construct and deliver to the Grand Signieur , as a present intended to garner trade and political advantages for England, a fantastic mechanical organ. Dallam’s wonder stood 16 feet high and was topped by a silver holly bush filled with blackbirds and thrushes that sung and shook their wings. Dallam kept a diary...
Aug 19, 2023•3 hr 51 min
Daisy Miller is an 1878 novella by Henry James. It portrays the confused courtship of the eponymous American girl by Winterbourne, a compatriot of hers with much more sophistication. His pursuit of her is hampered by her own flirtatiousness, which is frowned upon by the other expatriates they meet in Switzerland and Italy. Her lack of understanding of the social mores of the society she so desperately wishes to enter ultimately leads to tragedy.
Aug 18, 2023•2 hr 16 min
Support Us And Donate Here: https://libri-vox.org/donate/ Richard Horatio Edgar Wallace (April 1, 1875–February 10, 1932) was a prolific British crime writer, journalist and playwright, who wrote 175 novels, 24 plays, and countless articles in newspapers and journals. Over 160 films have been made of his novels, more than any other author. In the 1920s, one of Wallace's publishers claimed that a quarter of all books read in England were written by him. He is most famous today as the co-creat...
Aug 17, 2023•7 hr
The first collection by Irish-born poet William Butler Yeats. Many decades before his mysterious and austere Modernist verse earned him a Nobel prize, Yeats achieved renown as one of the last major poets in the High Romantic tradition. These poems showcase his Celtic imagination, his love for Irish folk-tales, and his commitment to the Romantic ideal of love. (Summary by Kasper Nijsen)
Aug 15, 2023•38 min
"Second, when telling such lies as may seem necessary to your international standing, do not tell the lies to the people who know the truth. Do not tell the Eskimos that snow is bright green; nor tell the negroes in Africa that the sun never shines in that Dark Continent. Rather tell the Eskimos that the sun never shines in Africa; and then, turning to the tropical Africans, see if they will believe that snow is green. Similarly, the course indicated for you is to slander the Russians to the Eng...
Aug 14, 2023•3 hr 28 min
This little book is an attempt to explain what each soul must discover for himself, that he stands in the midst of an eternal creative power which presses itself around his own thought, and casts back to him glorified all that he thinks. If it awakens within the consciousness of one single individual the realization that the mind of the Universal (which is the only mind that there is) is his own mind that the creative power of this mind is his also; that the manifestation of this mind is his own...
Aug 11, 2023•2 hr 19 min
Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore talks of the many things he feels is necessary for creativity through joy of unity, he covers many topics like the creative ideal, makes comparisons of creativity between the east and the west, the spirit of freedom and about his idea of an University.
Aug 10, 2023•4 hr 28 min
After a number of deaths in his close family, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle turned to spiritualism in hope of finding proof of the afterlife. Being open in this way, he wanted to believe that spirits and other supernatural being including fairies were real. Because of this he believed the photographs of fairies taken by the Cottingley girls were proof of the existence of such beings. In this book he presents his stance on the issue. Eventually it was proven that the photographs were indeed a hoax. (Sum...
Aug 09, 2023•3 hr 35 min
The Comedy of Errors is one of William Shakespeare's earliest plays, believed to have been written between 1592 and 1594. It is his shortest and one of his most farcical comedies, with a major part of the humour coming from slapstick and mistaken identity, in addition to puns and word play. The Comedy of Errors tells the story of two sets of identical twins that were accidentally separated at birth. Antipholus of Syracuse and his servant, Dromio of Syracuse, arrive in Ephesus, which turns out to...
Aug 08, 2023•1 hr 37 min
Henry Ossian Flipper--born into slavery in Thomasville, Georgia on March 21, 1856--did not learn to read and write until just before the end of the Civil War. Once the war had ended, Flipper attended several schools showing a great aptitude for knowledge. During his freshman year at Atlanta University he applied for admittance to the United States National Military Academy at West Point. He was appointed to the academy in 1873 along with a fellow African American, John W. Williams. Cadet William...
Aug 07, 2023•10 hr 33 min
In this novel, Chesnutt described the hopelessness of Reconstruction in a post-Civil War South that was bent on reestablishing the former status quo and rebuilding itself as a region of the United States where new forms of "slavery" would replace the old. This novel illustrated how race hatred and the impotence of a reluctant Federal Government trumped the rule of law, ultimately setting the stage for the rise of institutions such as Jim Crow, lynching, chain gangs and work farms--all establishe...
Aug 06, 2023•9 hr 6 min
Marley was dead, to begin with...until his ghost visits his miserly business partner, Ebenezer Scrooge, with a dire warning. Will Scrooge be able to change his ways, or is it already too late for him? - Summary by Geoffrey Venin
Aug 05, 2023•3 hr 3 min
A Child's History of England first appeared in serial form, running from January 25, 1851 to December 10, 1853 and was first published in three volume book form in 1852, 1853, and 1854. Dickens dedicated the book to "My own dear children, whom I hope it may help, bye and bye, to read with interest larger and better books on the same subject". The history covered the period between 50 BC and 1689, ending with a chapter summarising events from then until the ascension of Queen Victoria.
Aug 04, 2023•16 hr 21 min
This children's book retells twelve of Shakespeare's most popular plays as stories for children. Each of the plays are rewritten as short stories or fairy tales suitable to keep the attention of child readers or listeners. The introduction of the book cites a child's ability and desire to become familiar with the works of Shakespeare as a stepping-stone toward a greater appreciation of the actual plays later in life. (Summary by timferreira)
Aug 03, 2023•2 hr 35 min
The Catiline Conspiracy and the Jugurthine War are the two separate surviving works of the historian commonly known as "Sallust". Nearly contemporary to the events he describes, he is supposed to have been a retired officer of Caesar's army. "Catiline" contains the history of the memorable year 63. Sallust describes Catiline as the deliberate foe of law, order and morality (although party politics may have influenced his view). Still, Sallust does recount Catiline's noble traits, including his c...
Aug 02, 2023•6 hr 44 min
The Cathay poems appeared in a slim volume in 1915. They are, in effect, Ezra Pound’s English translations/interpretations from notebooks written by the Japanese scholar Ernest Fenollosa. Pound, not knowing any Chinese or Japanese at all, promptly created a new and somewhat complex style of translation, as he had done with words from several other languages. The Cathay poems are primarily written by the Chinese poet Li Po, referred to throughout these translations as Rihaku, the Japanese form of...
Aug 01, 2023•46 min
Aristotle (384 BCE - 322 BCE) Translated by Octavius Freire Owen (1816 - 1873) Categories (Lat. Categoriae, Greek Κατηγορίαι Katēgoriai) is the first of Aristotle's six texts on logic which are collectively known as the Organon. In Categories Aristotle enumerates all the possible kinds of things that can be the subject or the predicate of a proposition. Aristotle places every object of human apprehension under one of ten categories (known to medieval writers as the praedicamenta). Aristotle inte...
Jul 31, 2023•1 hr 44 min
Baroness Emma Orczy (full name: Emma ("Emmuska") Magdolna Rozália Mária Jozefa Borbála Orczy de Orczi) (September 23, 1865 – November 12, 1947) was a British novelist, playwright and artist of Hungarian noble origin. She was most notable for her series of novels featuring the Scarlet Pimpernel. Castles in the Air , a short novel or perhaps more like a collection of short stories with memories of a French rogue in the early 19th century Paris, was published in 1921 and about it I quote from the f...
Jul 30, 2023•7 hr 44 min
Support Us And Donate Here: https://libri-vox.org/donate/ The Castle of Otranto is a 1764 novel by Horace Walpole. It is generally held to be the first gothic novel, initiating a literary genre which would become extremely popular in the later 18th century and early 19th century. Thus, Castle, and Walpole by extension is arguably the forerunner to such authors as Ann Radcliffe, Bram Stoker, Daphne du Maurier, and Stephen King.Support Us And Donate Here: https://libri-vox.org/donate/...
Jul 29, 2023•3 hr 58 min
Carleton’s first eight years as governor of Canada were almost entirely occupied with civil administration. The next four were equally occupied with war.This is the account of how Carleton and his multiracial army fought off the American invasion of Quebec. It is the first time French and British troops worked together to defend Canada. Summary by Esther.
Jul 28, 2023•4 hr 42 min
Real men don't take guff from snotty kids. Neither does Disko Troop, skipper of the "We're Here", a fishing schooner out of Gloucester, Massachusetts, when his crew fishes Harvey Cheyne out of the Atlantic. There's no place on the Grand Banks for bystanders, so Harvey is press-ganged into service as a replacement for a man lost overboard and drowned. Harvey is heir to a vast fortune, but his rescuers believe none of what he tells them of his background. Disko won't take the boat to port until it...
Jul 27, 2023•5 hr 58 min
When tragedy hits his family, in the form of a sudden illness to his father, young Teddy Thornton is forced to leave school and find work to help support his family. Without his realization he is thrown into a world of crime and counterfeiting. Will he do the right thing, or will he unwittingly be drawn down the wrong path? And will the mystery of Heron Hall be solved? Mary T. Waggaman was a prolific Catholic writer of juvenile fiction in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s. (Introduction by Maria ...
Jul 26, 2023•3 hr 40 min
The novel, set in 1861, describes adventures of British expedition led by Captain John Hatteras to the North Pole. Hatteras is convinced that the sea around the pole is not frozen and his obsession is to reach the place no matter what. Mutiny by the crew results in destruction of their ship but Hatteras, with a few men, continues on the expedition.
Jul 25, 2023•4 hr 55 min
The novel, set in 1861, describes adventures of British expedition led by Captain John Hatteras to the North Pole. Hatteras is convinced that the sea around the pole is not frozen and his obsession is to reach the place no matter what. Mutiny by the crew results in destruction of their ship but Hatteras, with a few men, continues on the expedition.
Jul 24, 2023•7 hr 58 min
Captain Blood is an adventure novel by Rafael Sabatini, originally published in 1922. It concerns the sharp-witted Dr. Peter Blood, an Irish physician, who is convicted of treason in the aftermath of the Monmouth rebellion in 1685, and enslaved on the Caribbean island of Barbados. He escapes and becomes a pirate. Captain Blood was the basis for the Academy Award-nominated swashbuckling film that rocketed Errol Flynn and Olivia de Haviland to stardom in Hollywood. The fast-paced historical fictio...
Jul 23, 2023•12 hr 12 min
Translated by Friedrich Engels (1820 - 1895), Edward Aveling (1849 - 1898) . Capital, Volume I is the first of three volumes in Karl Marx’s monumental work, Das Kapital, and the only volume to be published during his lifetime, in 1867. Marx’s aim in Capital, Volume I is to uncover and explain the laws specific to the capitalist mode of production and of the class struggles rooted in these capitalist social relations of production. Marx said himself that his aim was “to bring a science [i.e. poli...
Jul 22, 2023•39 hr 20 min
Alexandre Dumas (1802 - 1870) Le roman raconte les aventures d'un gascon désargenté de 18 ans, d'Artagnan, monté à Paris faire carrière. Il se lie d'amitié avec Athos, Porthos et Aramis, mousquetaires du roi Louis XIII. Ces quatre hommes vont s'opposer au premier ministre, le Cardinal de Richelieu et à ses agents, dont la belle et mystérieuse Milady de Winter, pour sauver l'honneur de la reine de France Anne d'Autriche. Avec ses nombreux combats et ses rebondissements romanesques, Les Trois mous...
Jul 21, 2023•26 hr 58 min
John Wesley Powell was a pioneer American explorer, ethnologist, and geologist in the 19th Century. In 1869 he set out to explore the Colorado and the Grand Canyon. He gathered nine men, four boats and food for ten months and set out from Green River, Wyoming, on May 24. Passing through dangerous rapids, the group passed down the Green River to its confluence with the Colorado River (then also known as the Grand River upriver from the junction), near present-day Moab, Utah. The expedition's rout...
Jul 21, 2023•8 hr 8 min
The American Minister and his family have bought the English stately home Canterville Chase, complete with the ghost of Sir Simon de Canterville - blood-stains, clanking chains and all. But these modern Americans will have no truck with ghostly goings-on, and set out to beat the spectre at his own game. (Summary by David Barnes)
Jul 20, 2023•1 hr 23 min
A highly descriptive and engaging narrative from one of America's beloved nature writers, this short piece shows well Thoreau's great love of the early American wilderness. Be transported to the deep woods of Maine and share in both Thoreau's delight in nature and also his admiration of those others who have a deeper connection with the natural world around them.
Jul 19, 2023•2 hr 42 min
