Perennial Press: 340 books

            No one who visits both Rome and Athens at the present day can fail to be struck by one remarkable difference between the two famous cities, which stand for so much in the history of the world. While Athens is composed of a very old group of ruins and a brand-new town, which was...

There appears to be a settled belief, quite general in its expression, that the character of a daughter derives from the father rather than from the mother. Fathers, surely, enjoy this conceit; but Isabella of Castile, whom the historians of Spain denominate Isabel la Catolica, affords a noble exception....

But for the zeal and ability of one disciple we should not now possess any trustworthy account of the teaching of Epictetus. For, like not a few other sages, he wrote nothing - his teaching was purely oral, delivered, in the form of lectures or discourses, to the students who came to him to receive...

THE present volume, as its title imports, relates a complicated series of conflicts of which the origin or the pretext has for the most part to be sought in the great religious schism of Christianity. But the cause of the restoration of Catholic unity in the West was, in the minds of both the supporters...

This was the threefold task of the House of Lancaster: to recover prestige abroad, to restore peace at home, to re-establish order in the Church. For Henry of Bolingbroke the crown was to prove a thankless burden; but his labors were not in vain, and his son succeeded to the throne under happier auspices....

THE century subsequent to the peace of Westphalia is distinguished as the age of Louis the Fourteenth, that monarch being the sun by which it was illumined, and whose splendor was reflected by all the courts of Europe. The first revolution against the middle ages was accomplished in him, by his subjection...

CERTAIN basic principles in society and in politics were proclaimed by the French Revolution. The Napoleonic Era served to communicate them to Europe. The ensuing period was marked by a bitter struggle within nearly every European state for their general acceptance or for their wholesale rejection.   To...

About the middle of the year 1414, Henry the Fifth, influenced by the persuasions of Chicheley, Archbishop of Canterbury, by the dying injunction of his royal father not to allow the kingdom to remain long at peace, or, more probably, by those feelings of ambition which were no less natural to his...

Once upon a time there was an ugly little boy called Peter, who lived in his father's castle in France. He was a restless boy, and liked always to do or to hear something new. His home was very quiet, for his father was a great fighter, and was often away at the wars for months at a time. But though...

Ibrahim was a Christian of base extraction, the son of a Greek sailor of Parga. He was born in 1494. In his childhood he was captured by Turkish corsairs. It would seem that he was first sold to a widow of Magnesia, who clothed him well and had him well educated, and especially trained to perform...

FROM the land of the Turks-Turkestan in Central Asia-there descended beginning in A.D. 800 a series of hordes and armies which overran and gradually took possession of that portion of South-Eastern Europe and Western Asia once known as Turkey. After five hundred years Mohammed II seized upon Constantinople,...

At the beginning of the period Rome was old and worn out with misgovernment and evil living. But planted in this dying Rome there was the new and vigorous Christian Church which was to draw up into itself all that was best and strongest of the old world. The Germans were rude and uncivilized, but...

THE period which elapsed between the close of the Crimean war and the establishment of the German Empire at the beginning of 1871, may be said to contain events of more importance as regards the European system than even its reconstruction by the Congress of Vienna. These events are, besides the new...

The story of the attempts made by the statesmen of Europe to detach the United States from their traditional policy (notably the efforts of the Tsar idealist, Alexander I, to induce the government in Washington to accede to the pact of the Holy Alliance) forms an almost forgotten chapter of American...