The National Geographic Magazine, an illustrated monthly, the November Number. It includes the following articles: * The Witwatersrand and the Revolt of the Uitlanders, by George F. Becker * The Economic Aspects of Soil Erosion by Dr N. S. Shaler * A Critical Period in South African History, by John Hyde * Geographical Notes - Asia

A collection of the newspaper columns/essays written by G.K. Chesterton for "The New Witness", under the heading "At the Sign of the World's End". This project compiles the articles included in the issues between November 21, 1919 to April 30, 1920.

This is the 28th Coffee Break Collection, in which readers select and read stories or poems, fiction or non-fiction pieces of fifteen minutes' duration or less, suitable for short commutes and coffee breaks. The subject for this collection is "HOBBIES"... and the collection is full after 20 pieces have been submitted.

Soporific dullness is in the ear of the listener, and what's tedium incarnate to one person will be another person's passion and delight. However, it is hoped that at least one from the range of topics here presented will lull the busy mind to a state of sweet sleep.Introduction by Cori Samuel

In January 1909 a friend of the Scientific American paid the sum of 500$ which was to be awarded as a prize for the best popular explanation of the Fourth Dimension. The object being to set forth in an essay not longer than 2500 words the meaning of the term so that the lay reader could understand it. 245 essays were submitted, the 500$ prize was awarded to Lieut.-Col. Graham Denby Fitch, Corps of Engineers, USA, and the essay was published in the Scientific American of July 3rd 1909. Despite the character of the subject, extraordinary interest was manifested in the contest...

Olive Schreiner was a South African writer born in 1855 to missionary parents in the Eastern Cape. She is credited with being the first Internationally famous South African Novelist. She was an extraordinary person and was one of the earliest campaigners for women's rights, including the right to equal pay for equal work, saying: "The fact that for equal work equally well performed by a man and by a woman it is ordained that the woman on the ground of her sex alone shall receive a less recompense is the nearest approach to a willful and unqualified "wrong" in the whole relation of woman to society today"...

This is a posthumous collection of essays by Randolph Bourne. Many originally appeared in the journal "The Seven Arts," before the controversial end to its run. Also included is the unfinished manuscript of "The State," the book Bourne worked on until his tragic death in December, 1918, at the hands of the Spanish flu pandemic. In the words of the book's editor, poet James Oppenheim, "We have nothing else like this book in America. It is the only living record of the suppressed minority, and is, as so often the case, the prophecy of that minority's final triumph." - Summary by Ben Adams

The National Geographic Magazine, an illustrated monthly, the June Number. It includes the following articles: * The Seine, the Meuse, and the Moselle, by William M. Davis * Across the Gulf by rail to Key West, by Jefferson B. Browne * A geographical description of the British Islands, by W. M. Davis * The Mexican Census along with geographic literature, notes and miscellanea.

The National Geographic Magazine, an illustrated monthly, the February Number. It includes the following articles: * Venezuela: Her Government, People, and Boundary, by William E. Curtis * The Panama Canal Route, by Robert T. Hill * The Tehuantepec Ship Railway, by Elmer L. Corthell * The Present State of the Nicaragua Canal, by Gen. A. W. Greely * Explorations by the Bureau of American Ethnology in 1895, by W. J. McGee * The Valley of the Orinoco, by T. H. Gignilliat * Yucatan in 1895 along with geographic literature and notes.

Eighteen short nonfiction works in the public domain, independently chosen by the readers. Topics include a woman in Alaska, Cuban folklore, and hunting peccaries on the Nueces; Max Planck's Quantum Theory and Newton's world view; church bells and chocolate cake; naval flag signals, rocket life-saving apparatus, and seashore plants and pebbles; also many literary and philosophical figures including Jonathan Swift, Jonathan Edwards, Johann Fichte, Joseph Butler, George Sand, Marie Corelli, G. K. Chesterton, and Hilaire Belloc.

The National Geographic Magazine, an illustrated monthly, the May Number. It includes the following articles: * Africa Since 1888, by Hon. Gardiner G. Hubbard, LL. D. * Fundamental Geographic Relation of the Three Americas, by Robert T. Hill * The Kansas River, by Arthur P. Davis * Annual Report of the Superintendent of the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey, by Herbert G. Ogden along with geographic literature, and a few miscellaneous notes.

Eighteen short nonfiction works in the public domain, independently chosen by the readers. Topics include biographies of astronomer Fiammetta Wilson, naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, mountaineer Jacques Balmat, French Revolutionist Camille Desmoulins, and Buddha; a climb of Mt. Fuji by Lafcadio Hearn, reviews of 20th century poetry and of books by E. M. Delafield, Mrs. Gaskell, and Kierkegaard; marriage; motion pictures; color blindness; and an essay on optimism by Helen Keller.

A number of most agreeable Inquirendoes upon Life & Letters, interspersed with Short Stories & Skits, the whole most Diverting to the Reader. SHANDYGAFF: a very refreshing drink, being a mixture of bitter ale or beer and ginger-beer, commonly drunk by the lower classes in England, and by strolling tinkers, low church parsons, newspaper men, journalists, and prizefighters. Said to have been invented by Henry VIII as a solace for his matrimonial difficulties. It is believed that a continual bibbing of shandygaff saps the will, the nerves, the resolution, and the finer faculties, but there are those who will abide no other tipple...

Nineteen short nonfiction works in the public domain, independently chosen by the readers. Topics include the role of "people of color" in New Orleans and Louisiana history, the question of voting rights for Blacks after the Civil War; W.E.B.Du Bois on the American Negro Academy, and a biography of Harriet Tubman; Irish patriot Robert Everet's execution appeal; Swendenborg and spiritism; the optics of the kaleidoscope; the daily life of sailors and housewives; the relation of meteor showers to a massive earthquake in 1755; John Ruskin; Friedrich Schelling; Bramah's Kai Lung stories; and articles on the bottlenose whale and botrytis mold.

Nineteen short nonfiction works in the public domain, independently chosen by the readers. Topics include wives, widows, and women scorned--the "Baby Doe Tabor" scandal, the trials of literary marriages, and colonial women; history--Wounded Knee, the Underground Railroad, Edward Bellamy's "nationalism," and English railroads; inspiring places--the Alhambra and Squaw Rock; invention--the marine chronometer; and essays on the Constitution, the natural equality of men, old age, the consolation of reading, and on the fantastic imagination...

Logan Pearsall Smith was an American-born British essayist who was known for his epigrams and aphorisms, often humorous. This recording is of two of his collections of these bon mots. For example: “These pieces of moral prose have been written, dear Reader, by a large Carnivorous Mammal, belonging to that suborder of the Animal Kingdom which includes also the Orang-outang, the tusked Gorilla, the Baboon with his bright blue and scarlet bottom, and the long-eared Chimpanzee.”

Thirty three essays by more or less well-known authors of Britain, the United States, and Canada, each fronted by an introductory paragraph. Early twentieth or late nineteenth centuries. “I think I can offer you, in this parliament of philomaths [lover of learning], entertainment of the most genuine sort;…as brilliant and sincere work is being done to-day in the essay as in any period of our literature. Accordingly the pieces reprinted here are very diverse. There is the grand manner; there is foolery; there is straightforward literary criticism; there is pathos, politics, and the picturesque...

This is the second volume of the Letters, Epistles LXVI-XCII. Among the personalities of the early Roman Empire there are few who offer to the readers of to-day such dramatic interest as does Lucius Annaeus Seneca, the author of the Epistles. These letters, written by Seneca towards the end of his life, are all addressed to his friend Lucilius, who, at the time when these letters were written, was a procurator in Sicily. The form of this work, as Bacon says, is a collection of essays rather than of letters. Summary paraphrased from the Introduction in Volume 1 by Suprad.

“We must inscribe on our banner the revolutionary watchword, ‘Abolition of the wage system’” The Industrial Workers of the World , members of which are commonly termed "Wobblies," is an international labor union that was founded in 1905. The philosophy and tactics of the IWW are described as "revolutionary industrial unionism," with ties to both socialist and anarchist labor movements. The IWW promotes the concept of "One Big Union," and contends that all workers should be united as a social class to supplant capitalism and wage labor with industrial democracy...

A posthumous collection of Bourne's writing from publications such as The Atlantic Monthly and early issues of The New Republic, with a long introduction by his friend and colleague Van Wyck Brooks. Includes the influential and perennially relevant essay "Trans-National America" as well as a fragment from the autobiographical novel on which Bourne was working at the time of his death. - Summary by Ben Adams

The Columbian Orator, a collection of political essays, poems, and dialogues first published in 1797, was widely used in American schoolrooms in the first quarter of the 19th century to teach reading and speaking. Typical of many readers of that period, the anthology included many speeches celebrating "republican virtues" and promoting patriotism. The Columbian Orator is an example of progymnasmata, containing examples for students to copy and imitate. In his Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, former slave and abolitionist writer Douglass describes how he "got hold" of a copy of the Columbian Orator at the age of twelve, with far-reaching consequences for his life...

Twenty short nonfiction works in the public domain, independently chosen by the readers. Topics include meteor showers, smallpox inoculation, telegraphy, fear of death, church bell change-ringing , painting as a pastime, prejudice against Jews from Mark Twain's perspective, the view from Braddock Heights, Maryland, philosophical reflections by Saint Bonaventure, Paracelsus, and Friedrich Jacobi, letters written by Thomas Jefferson and James Monroe, and eulogies to Alexander Hamilton and John Keats.The Degrees of Ascension to God by Saint Bonaventure was translated by Thomas Davidson.

This is a frank eyewitness description of the suffering, starvation in particular, that was widely experienced in Central and Eastern Europe in the aftermath of "The Great War". “It is not stating matters too strongly to say that…peace had caused at least as much misery as the four years’ fury of embattled armies.” It is a powerful political and anti-war statement with scant mention of any battle. – Lee Smalley

Arthur Bingham Walkley was an exceedingly popular critic, working as a drama critic at The Times alone for no less than 26 years, and writing for several other newspapers and privately besides that. This book of pastiches was completed after he already had more than two decades of work as a theatre critic under his belt, and it draws some brilliant characterisations. Among the literary and historical figures found in the different pastiches are such illustrious figures as Aristotle and Shakespeare, but also more modern phenomena as movies are discussed, along with politicians and other famous persons of the time. - Summary by Carolin

A collection of essays on 19th century novelists, both famous ones and those largely forgotten now. Among the writers presented most wrote in English, but three foreign authors are also discussed. Phelps taught a course on novels at a university and he added to those biographical essays some of his ideas about the importance of novels in the process of teaching about literature.

Eighteen short nonfiction works in the public domain, independently chosen by the readers. Topics include philosophy and thought -- Plato, Aristotle, Leonhard Euler, Henri Amiel, and the French Rights of Man; adventure and mystery -- the ascent of Aconcagua and the mystery ship Mary Celeste; science -- a new comet and lichen dyes; portraits of the seasons by Lucy Maud Montgomery: biographies of Charles Dickens and Clara and Robert Schuman; a history of the Transcendental utopia Fruitlands by Louisa May Alcott, and an essay on reading by Isaac Disraeli. summary by Sue Anderson

People learn from other people, and races have forever learned from other races. Herein we are treated to an in-depth understanding of categorized social characteristics of the Native American peoples, primarily those of the western U.S. as they existed at the time of book publication . 'In dealing with [the Native Americans] as a race, a people, therefore, I do as I would with my own race, I take what to me seem to be racial characteristics, or in other words, the things that are manifested in the lives of the best men and women, and which seem to represent their habitual aims, ambitions, and desires.' - Summary by Roger Melin & book foreword

This is a collection of 32 highly diverting essays of English author Richard Middleton. Although Middleton is now best remembered for his ghost stories, he was also an accomplished poet and essayist. The musings collected in this volume cover a variety of topics, including poetry, art, and politics. - Summary by Carolin

Étienne de La Boétie was the closest friend of Michel de Montaigne and the subject of the latter's famous essay "On Friendship." Here, however, he tackles a different, more impersonal relationship: that of ruler and ruled. The argument in this work is encapsulated in this quote: "A people enslaves itself, cuts its own throat, when, having a choice between being vassals and being free men, it deserts its liberties and takes on the yoke, gives consent to its own misery, or, rather, apparently welcomes it...

"I am of the company of book men who read simply for the love of it," confesses E. Walter Walters, in this gently written tome. Walters documents his habit of "book fishing--" seeking and finding quality volumes in the discount binds at his booksellers, and as a connoisseur of wine might match varieties with courses, he matches his books with the contexts in which he reads them--in the garden, in the bedroom, with friends. He also provides a list of his favorite authors and favorite books, as well as favorite characters from the books he has read, not in a way to impose his choices on other readers, but to share his own personal experiences.

Written when the United States extended only to the Mississippi River, by one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, this short work explores the physical, social, and mental effects of distilled liquors; the classes of people prone to intoxication by them; suggested drinks to use instead of them; and remedies for intoxication and for their habitual use. He takes a medical view of alcoholism, exploring the physical causes rather than blaming moral failure as the cause. Alcoholic drinks that are not distilled are viewed as wholesome drinks, and opium is suggested for pain as being without bad effects or addictive qualities.

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.