A short, provocative book about why "useless" science often leads to humanity's greatest technological breakthroughsA forty-year tightening of funding for scientific research has meant that resources are increasingly directed toward applied or practical outcomes, with the intent of creating products of immediate value. In such a scenario, it makes sense to focus on the most identifiable and urgent problems, right? Actually, it doesn't. In his classic essay "The Use...

Prostitution will be studied in these pages from the standpoint of the practical experience of European countries. An effort will be made to ascertain its forms and extent, the sources from which it is recruited, the conditions that either cause or conduce to it, the procedure of different communities in dealing with it and with the conditions responsible for it, the measures which have been employed by way of combat or control, and the results which have been thus obtained. Material will ...

Originally published in 1930. Flexiner’s Universities was the big book on higher education when it was first published in 1930 and continued to be such until the appearance of Robert Maynard Hutchins’ The Higher Learning in America in 1936. Universities continues to be one of the great books in the field more than sixty years later・but for quite different reasons now than then.

This file includes 11 books: Medieval Hebrew (featuring The Midrash and medieval collections of Jewish biblical lore and legend), Hebraic Literature (translations from the Talmud, Midrashim, and KabbalaTales and Maxims from the Midrash by Samuel Rapaport, The Sayings of the Jewish Fathers (Pirke Abot), Kitab al Khazari by Judah Hallevi, the Legends of the Jews by Louis Ginzberg, Philo-Judaeus of alexandria by Norman Bentwich, The guide for the Perplexed by Moses Maimonides, The Ethics by B...

Mommsen's history of the Roman Republic in five volumes. These volumes cover from the founding of Rome up to the disintegration of the First Triumvirate (Caesar, Pompey, Crassus). The author cites dates in the Roman style, AUC, from the founding of the city in 753 BC. A table at the end shows modern-day equivalents. According to Wikipedia, Mommsen is "generally regarded as the greatest classicist of the 19th century." This work complements Gibbon's "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire".

Publius Cornelius Tacitus (AD56 - AD117) was a Roman orator, lawyer and senator. He is considered one of antiquities greatest historians. The surviving portions of his major works - "The Histories" and "The Annals" - examine the reigns of the Emperors Tiberius, Claudius, Nero and those who reigned in the "Year of the Four Emperors". These two works cover the span of history from the death of Augustus in AD14 to the death of Domitian in 96AD - although much of the later material is lost to ...

Vegetius's De re militari is the most influential military treatise to survive from late antiquity, a disciplined compendium of Roman martial practice, recruitment, training, camp construction, tactics, siegecraft, and naval warfare. Written in a terse, admonitory Latin prose, it looks backward to the perceived rigor of the republican and early imperial legions while addressing the military anxieties of a weakened later empire. Its literary mode is both technical manual and moral exhortati...

This file includes both Plutarch's Lives (all 50 biographies and 18 comparisons) and "Lives of the 12 Caesars" by Suetonius. According to Wikipedia: "Plutarch's Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans, commonly called Parallel Lives or Plutarch's Lives, is a series of biographies of famous men, arranged in tandem to illuminate their common moral virtues or failings, written in the late 1st century. The surviving Parallel Lives, as they are more properly and commonly known, contain twenty-thre...

The Greatest Works of Honoré de Balzac gathers the essential achievements of the novelist whose vast Comédie humaine transformed fiction into a panoramic study of modern society. Through intricate plots, densely realized settings, and psychologically charged portraits, Balzac anatomizes ambition, money, class mobility, desire, and moral compromise in post-Revolutionary France. His style combines documentary precision with melodramatic intensity, linking realism to the energies of romance a...

Translation based on W. A. McDevitte and W. S. Bohn, 1869 The Gallic Wars were a series of military campaigns waged by the Roman proconsul Julius Caesar against several Gallic tribes, lasting from 58 BC to 51 BC. The Romans would also raid Britannia and Germania, but these expeditions never developed into full-scale invasions. The Gallic Wars culminated in the decisive Battle of Alesia in 52 BC, in which a complete Roman victory resulted in the expansion of the Roman Republic over the whol...

The Germania (Latin: De Origine et situ Germanorum, lit. The Origin and Situation of the Germans), written by Gaius Cornelius Tacitus around 98, is an ethnographic work on the Germanic tribes outside the Roman Empire.This work survived only in one single manuscript that was found in Hersfeld Abbey, Holy Roman Empire and brought to Italy in 1455 where Enea Silvio Piccolomini, the later Pope Pius II, first examined and analyzed it, whereby he sparked interest among German humanists such as C...

A clazzic work of military history, this was the first systematic study of the auxiliary soldiers who fought alongside the Roman legions. Using evidence ranging from their gravestones to the discharge papers that eventually granted them citizenship, Cheesman traces the evolution of the “barbarian” auxiliaries, from ad-hoc local levies to highly specialized units that became a vital component of the Roman army. Separate chapters cover the size and organization of auxiliary units; where and ...