19Th Century category: 5646 books

“I’m in a business where people come to me with troubles. Big troubles, little troubles, but always troubles they don’t want to take to the cops.” That’s Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, succinctly setting out our image of the private eye. A no-nonsense loner, working on the margins...

The early Bohemians, poets, anarchists and immigrants all converged on Bowery Street in New Yorks Lower East Side during the 1890's. Bunner looks at Life on Bowery in this short illustrated essay.

"The Journal of Rachel Van Dyke," a compelling primary document previously unpublished, offers insights into the life and mind of a seventeen-year-old young woman, while also providing a fascinating window into the cultural and social landscape of the early national period. Rachel was a...

In A Little Something About Kentucky, James Lane Allen, Kentucky's first and one of her foremost novelists gives us two essays that predate his first successful novel, “A Kentucky Cardinal.” Here we learn something of life in Kentucky during the latter part of the nineteenth Century. First published as “Court Days in Kentucky” and “Kentucky Fairs.”

A Californian on a world tour spends a discovers mid nineteenth Century Iceland and Icelanders. From the original Serialization of 1863.

Surrey, one of England's smallest counties, has for centuries embodied contrasts in style and appearance. In the north where its boundary is the Thames, there is industrial and, more recently, suburban London, and further South, are the more rural areas of the Downs and Weald, which were the playground...

"I am not ambitious, I seek only to please for the present moment, leaving the glory of posthumous fame, to the thousand little celebrities of the day," writes Lizzie, one of the regular contributors to The Akron Offering, a literary magazine of mid-nineteenth century Northeast Ohio. "I...

In the wake of World War II, Americans developed an unusually deep and all-encompassing national unity, as postwar affluence and the Cold War combined to naturally produce a remarkable level of agreement about the nation's core values. Or so the story has long been told. Inventing the "American...

An American Procession is a study, on the largest scale, of the major American writers at work during the historically and literarily crucial century that began in the early 1830s, when Ralph Waldo Emerson founded a national literature on the basis of a metaphysical revolution, and ended on the eve...

“ ‘Chet’ Arthur President of the United States. Good God!” was perhaps the most pithy contemporary reaction to the accession of the twenty-first Chief Executive. It has certainly been the most enduring, even though Arthur himself has remained an enigma—in large part because this shrewd,...

A masterful biography of England's most notorious literary figure. Author of the scandalous Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, Thomas De Quincey (1785-1859) has long lacked a full-fledged biography. His friendships with leading poets and men of letters in the Romantic and Victorian periods—...

“Freud, Jung, Adler, Calkins, James” provides brief biographies of each historic individual within the field. In addition to a biography are theoretical positions of each individual providing input into their philosophical identities.

In the late nineteenth century, the British Empire commanded the seas and possessed a vast Indian Empire, as well as other extensive dominions in South East Asia, Australasia, America and Africa.

To secure the trade route to the glittering riches of the orient, the port of Berbera in Somaliland...

The amazing story behind the greatest newspapermen to ever live—Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst—lies primarily hidden with their reporters who were in the field. They risked their lives in Cuba as the country grappled for independence simply to “get the story” and write what were...