First published in 1869, Lorna Doone is the story of John Ridd, a farmer who finds love amid the religious and social turmoil of seventeenth-century England. He is just a boy when his father is slain by the Doones, a lawless clan inhabiting wild Exmoor on the border of Somerset and Devon. Seized by curiosity and a sense of adventure, he makes his way to the valley of the Doones, where he is discovered by the beautiful Lorna. In time their childish fantasies blossom into mature lov...

A stirring account of wartime experiences from the leader of the first regiment of emancipated slavesThomas Wentworth Higginson, a Unitarian minister, was a fervent member of new England's abolitionist movement, an active participant in the Underground Railroad, and part of a group that supplied material aid to John Brown before his ill-fated raid on Harpers Ferry. When the Civil War broke out, Higginson was commissioned as a colonel of the black troops training in...

While much has been written about the impact of Darwin’s theories on U.S. culture, and countless scholarly collections have been devoted to the science of evolution, few have addressed the specific details of Darwin’s theories as a cultural force affecting U.S. writers. America’s Darwin fills this gap and features a range of critical approaches that examine U.S. textual responses to Darwin’s works.The scholars in this collection represent a range of disciplines—literature,...

Dariel: A romance of Surrey is a novel by R. D. Blackmore published in 1897. It is an adventure story set initially in Surrey before the action moves to the Caucasian mountains. The story is narrated by George Cranleigh, a farmer who falls in love with Dariel, the daughter of a Caucasian prince. Dariel was the last of Blackmore's novels, published just over two years before his death.

In the days when England trusted mainly to the vigor and valor of one man, against a world of enemies, no part of her coast was in greater peril than the fair vale of Springhaven. But lying to the west of the narrow seas, and the shouts both of menace and vigilance, the quiet little village in the tranquil valley forbore to be uneasy.

Far from any house or hut, in the depth of dreary moor-land, a road, unfenced and almost unformed, descends to a rapid river. The crossing is called the "Seven Corpse Ford," because a large party of farmers, riding homeward from Middleton, banded together and perhaps well primed through fear of a famous highwayman, came down to this place on a foggy evening, after heavy rain-fall. One of the company set before them what the power of the water was, but they laughed at him and spurred into i...

Slave Narrative Six Pack 7 presents six more essential texts:My Life in the South by Jacob Stroyer.The Narrative of Lunsford Lane, Formerly of Raleigh, N.C. by Lunsford Lane.Army Life in a Black Regiment by Thomas Wentworth Higginson.A Plea for Captain John Brown by Henry David Thoreau.An Anti-Slavery Crusade: A Chronicle of the Gathering Storm by Jesse Macy.Henry Ward Beec...

"Enthralling." —Frans de Waal, New York Times Book ReviewSurvival of the fittest or survival of the nicest? Since the dawn of time man has contemplated the mystery of altruism, but it was Darwin who posed the question most starkly. From the selfless ant to the stinging bee to the man laying down his life for a stranger, evolution has yielded a goodness that in theory should never be.Set against the sweeping tale of 150 years of scientific attempts ...

pubOne.info present you this wonderfully illustrated edition. The fifth part of a century almost has sped with the flight of time since the outbreak of the Slaveholder's Rebellion against the United States. The young men of to-day were then babes in their cradles, or, if more than that, too young to be appalled by the terror of the times. Those now graduating from our schools of learning to be teachers of youth and leaders of public thought, if they are ever prepared to teach the history of t...

“I often said before starting, that I had no doubt I should frequently repent of the whole undertaking.” So wrote Charles Darwin aboard The Beagle, bound for the Galapagos Islands and what would arguably become the greatest and most controversial discovery in scientific history. But the theory of evolution did not spring full-blown from the head of Darwin. Since the dawn of humanity, priests, philosophers, and scientists have debated the origin and development of life on ...

"Provocative and delightfully discursive essays on natural history. . . . Gould is the Stan Musial of essay writing. He can work himself into a corkscrew of ideas and improbable allusions paragraph after paragraph and then, uncoiling, hit it with such power that his fans know they are experiencing the game of essay writing at its best."--John Noble Wilford, New York Times Book Review

First published in 1863, a first-hand account of an episode of the American Civil War. "The expedition, in the daring of its conception, had the wildness of a romance; while in the gigantic and overwhelming results it sought and was likely to accomplish, it was absolutely sublime."-- Official Report of Hon. Judge Holt to the Secretary of War. "It was all the deepest laid scheme, and on the grandest scale, that ever emanated from the brains of any number of Yankees combined."--Atlanta "Sout...