Robert Bethune
Author
Formats
Description
First published in English by Edward Fitzgerald in 1859 from its original Farsi, "The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam" is a collection of quatrains attributed to Omar Khayyam, a Persian astronomer and mathematician born in the later part of the 11th century. Omar Khayyam's poetry, which received very little international notoriety in its own day, achieved classic status when it was discovered and rendered into English verse by Edward Fitzgerald over seven...
Author
Formats
Description
Frederick Jackson Turner (1861-1932) presented an essay at the World's Fair in Chicago in 1893 that would change the study of American History forever. This essay would ultimately be published with twelve supporting articles to form "The Frontier in American History". Turner was an innovator in that he was one of the first to call attention to the Frontier as an integral part of the study of The United States of America. Turner himself grew up on...
Author
Series
Formats
Description
Featuring prominent figures in education, religion, science, and war, Eminent Victorians is a fascinating collection of Victorian biographies. Beginning with a discussion of the achievements of Cardinal Manning, Strachey provides insight on the Cardinal's rise to power and follows the creation of the Oxford Movement, which began the development of the Anglo-Catholic church. Sparing no detail, Manning's feud with the influential theologian John Henry...
4) Don Juan
Author
Formats
Description
First published in 1819, "Don Juan" is often acknowledged as one of Lord Byron's greatest poetic works. An epic poem, comprised of seventeen cantos that Byron continued to work on and expand until his death, "Don Juan" follows the adventures of the famous Spanish libertine and reflects upon many of the romantic and personal experiences that are universal to all mankind. From a forbidden love affair in Spain, to exile in Italy, from being shipwrecked...
Author
Series
Formats
Description
A new edition of the seminal text by the father of modern economics.
First published in 1919, John Maynard Keynes's The Economic Consequences of the Peace created immediate controversy. Keynes was a firsthand witness to the negotiations of the Paris Peace Conference, as an official representative of the British Treasury, and he simultaneously sat as deputy for the chancellor of the Exchequer on the Supreme Economic Council. In these roles, he was...
Author
Formats
Description
Nature was a form of religion for naturalist, essayist, and early environmentalist Henry David Thoreau (1817–62). In communing with the natural world, he wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and learn what it had to teach. Toward that end Thoreau built a cabin in the spring of 1845 on the shores of Walden Pond, on land owned by Ralph Waldo Emerson, outside Concord, Massachusetts. There he observed nature, farmed,...
Author
Formats
Description
Penned by American philosopher and transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau, On the Duty of Civil Disobedience examines the role of the individual's conscience in governmental rule. Thoreau argues that individual citizens must not simply be subject to the decisions of government, but should question every political act to ensure that the system remains a tool for justice and morality-a message that continues to resonate powerfully in modern times.
...
Author
Formats
Description
The most incisive comment on politics today is indifference. When men and women begin to feel that elections and legislatures do not matter very much, that politics is a rather distant and unimportant exercise, the reformer might as well put to himself a few searching doubts. Indifference is a criticism that cuts beneath oppositions and wranglings by calling the political method itself into question. Leaders in public affairs recognize this. They...
Author
Formats
Description
There exists, of course, few more famous figures in the field of psychology than Sigmund Freud. As the founding father of psychoanalysis, or the clinical method for treating psychopathology through dialogue between a patient and a psychoanalyst, his impact on the field of psychology cannot be overstated. In 1898 Sigmund Freud published a short essay on the psychology of forgetfulness. It is from this essay that the following work would grow out of....
Author
Formats
Description
Dive into the haunting world of "The Scarlet Letter" by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Set in 17th-century Puritan Massachusetts, this novel weaves a gripping tale of love, sin, and redemption. Follow the enigmatic Hester Prynne, marked by the scarlet letter 'A' as a symbol of her adulterous affair. As secrets unravel, Reverend Dimmesdale grapples with his own hidden guilt. With vivid prose, Hawthorne explores the consequences of societal judgment and the enduring...
11) Fugitive Pieces
Author
Series
Formats
Description
Excerpt: "Fugitive Pieces, Byron's first volume of verse, was privately printed in the autumn of 1806, when Byron was eighteen years of age. Passages in Byron's correspondence indicate that as early as August of that year some of the poems were in the printers' hands and that during the latter part of August and during September the printing was suspended in order that Byron might give his poems an "entire new form." The new form consisted, in part,...
Author
Formats
Description
The name Kelmscott bears a legendary and magical sound among bibliophiles. When William Morris founded the Kelmscott Press in 1890, he combined his medieval craft ideals with his skills as one of Britain's most sophisticated, progressive designers. He achieved his goal - the creation of books as beautiful as those of the Middle Ages - by abandoning many of the commercial practices of his day. Morris designed types of great elegance and reintroduced...
Author
Formats
Description
Poet Louise Bogan called this 1897 volume “one of the hinges upon which American poetry was able to turn from the sentimentality of the 90's toward modern veracity and psychological truth." The collection, Robinson's second, caught the eye of President Theodore Roosevelt in 1905, who was instrumental in providing the impoverished poet a much-needed sinecure.
14) Avon's Harvest
Author
Formats
Description
Published in 1921, this book-length poem has been interpreted by some as a ghost story, by others as a tale of revenge, and by others still as the record of a mind reduced to madness. The narrator is an old friend of Avon's, a successful lawyer plagued by a mysterious sense of guilt.
15) A Shropshire Lad
Author
Formats
Description
The charms of the poems in A Shropshire Lad, published in 1896, continue to resonate today. Housman's first collection and his signature work, the poems here mix the styles of traditional English ballads and classical verse, and evoke the idyllic English countryside, explore the nature of friendship, bravery, and the passing of youth, among other themes.
Author
Description
Although the theories presented in this book, a 1915 edition of the lectures Jung presented at Fordham University, are now thoroughly outdated, this book is still a fascinating glimpse of Jung's mind at a crucial time in his life. Just three years previously, he had struck out on his own, publishing his Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido, known in English as Psychology of the Unconscious. That book represented his break from the Vienna school led by...
Author
Description
Rupert Brooke possessed one of the most amazingly sensitive, amazingly sensual poetic minds of the 20th century. Born into a world swiftly sliding into war, torn between highly idealized, romanticized relationships with men and conflicted, often bitter love for women, he expressed his complex emotions and vivid perceptions in verse of startling force, striking sensory intensity, and sometimes sly and biting humor. He left us just under one hundred...
Author
Description
Sarah Bernhardt embodied -- and indeed, in many ways, invented -- the persona of the superstar actress. During her life and after her death, she was constantly the center of a swirl of drama, attention, controversy and emotional display, both on and off the stage--and she did everything she could to keep the swirl swirling, fanning the winds and the breezes in all possible ways. The one thing that cannot be denied about her is her extraordinary ability...
Author
Description
This was Carl Sandburg's breakthrough book. It is easy to see how it draws directly on Sandburg's life in Chicago, as it speaks powerfully of the specific character of that city and begins with his famous poem that names Chicago as the "City of the Broad Shoulders". His poetry is deeply aware of the inner life of the city, from a homeless woman freezing in a doorway to the lifestyles of the rich and powerful. Sandburg, even in his poetry, is in many...
20) Smoke and Steel
Author
Description
This is Carl Sandburg's third book of poetry and his largest. It is also the most wide-ranging. The title, Smoke and Steel, suggests the steel industry he knew in Chicago, Gary, and Pittsburgh, but he writes about many other things as well. His over-arching theme seems to be human life as a struggle in adversity, a struggle for the mere necessities of life - food, clothing, shelter, work - and a struggle for the human soul, a struggle for love, charity,...