One of the twentieth century’s great paleontologists and science writers, Stephen Jay Gould was, for Bruce S. Lieberman and Niles Eldredge, also a close colleague and friend. In Macroevolutionaries, they take up the tradition of Gould’s acclaimed essays on natural history, offering a series of wry and insightful reflections on the fields to which they have devoted their careers.Lieberman and Eldredge explore the major features of evolution, or “macroevolution,” examining k...

Originally published in 1889, The Blue Fairy Book was the first of 12 volumes of fairy tales from around the world, collected by renowned folklorist Andrew Lang. For more than a century it has been the book that introduces young readers to timeless fairy tales that include "Hansel and Gretel," "Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp," "Beauty and the Beast," "The Master Cat; or, Puss in Boots," "The Forty Thieves," and "Snow-White and Rose-Red."

Pigs is Pigs by Ellis Parker Butler

In September of 1884, Robert Louis Stevenson, then in his mid-thirties, moved with his family to Bournemouth, a resort on the southern coast of England, where in the brief span of 23 months he revised A Child's Garden of Verses and wrote the novels Kidnapped and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.An intriguing combination of fantasy thriller and moral allegory, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde depicts the gripping struggle of ...

"Rip Van Winkle" is a short story by the American author Washington Irving, first published in 1819. It follows a Dutch-American villager in colonial America named Rip Van Winkle who meets mysterious Dutchmen, imbibes their liquor and falls asleep in the Catskill Mountains.

For many centuries, Aristotle's Physics was the essential starting point for anyone who wished to study the natural sciences. Aristotle deals with many abstract ideas in this book, examining the phenomenon of being, space, motion, matter, time, infinity, magnitude, and more. This book is basically an explanation on how the universe works--as Aristotle understood it. It's not so much a straight forward philosophical text as it is a sort of compendium of problems that philosophers have spent...

Common Sense is a pamphlet advocating independence from Great Britain to people in the Thirteen Colonies. Writing in clear and persuasive prose, Paine marshaled moral and political arguments to encourage common people in the Colonies to fight for egalitarian government. It was published anonymously on January 10, 1776, at the beginning of the American Revolution, and became an immediate sensation.It was sold and distributed widely and read aloud at taverns...

American short-story writer and novelist Constance Woolson, a grandniece of James Fenimore Cooper, was born in 1840 in New Hampshire, but moved with her family to Cleveland, Ohio. She became known first as a writer of the Midwest; but in the 1870s, when she wintered with her mother in Florida, she traveled around the South and used that region in her writing. She called the Civil War, then still fresh in memory, the “heart and spirit” of her life, and many of her stories concerned the cult...

An afternoon of a cold winter’s day, when the sun shone forth with chilly brightness, after a long storm, two children asked leave of their mother to run out and play in the new-fallen snow. The elder child was a little girl, whom, because she was of a tender and modest disposition, and was thought to be very beautiful, her parents, and other people who were familiar with her, used to call Violet. But her brother was known by the style and title of Peony, on account of the ruddiness of his...

The Blithedale Romance is Nathaniel Hawthorne's third major romance. Its setting is a utopian farming commune based on Brook Farm, of which Hawthorne was a founding member and where he lived in 1841. The novel dramatizes the conflict between the commune's ideals and the members' private desires and romantic rivalries.

The great drinking hall, Heorot, provides merriment for warriors and wenches alike. But it provokes only avenging rage from swamp creature Grendel. Now, in sixth-century Denmark’s darkest hour, a light of hope comes in the warrior Beowulf of the Geats. With his quest to defeat Grendel and his vengeful demon mother, Beowulf embarks on a journey from the murky lagoon to the throne of the Geats.Beowulf, the Old English epic poem published anonymously centuries ago, remains on...

Henry Ossian Flipper was one of the nineteenth-century West’s most remarkable individuals. The first African American graduate of West Point, he served four years in the West as a cavalry officer but was court-martialed and dismissed from the service in 1882. He spent the rest of his long life attempting to clear his name.Flipper’s record of accomplishment was significant for any individual in any time, and for a nineteenth-century black American it was phenomenal. As historian Qui...