Born in slavery, but being fortunate enough to be owned by a benevolent mistress, her life takes a tragic turn when her parents and her benefactor die. The new heir to the property (and slaves) is a cruel and lewd man who begins to make inappropriate advances to the lovely young slave-girl. In a bid to escape, she becomes entangled in a relationship with a neighboring landowner who promises a better life, and she even has two children. However, things become worse for her when her cruel owner decides to punish her by sending her and her children to a distant cotton plantation to be “broken in.” She plans a devious method of escape and ends up spending seven terrible years locked up in ...
Arthur Guy Empey was an American who responded to the sinking of the Lusitania by enlisting with the British Army to fight in France. His experiences in the trenches, including his ultimate wounding and convalescence, became this book. When published in 1917, it was a major hit and helped the recruiting effort when America entered the Great War.
If you’ve heard of the horror of trench warfare in WWI and want to see it from below dirt level, Empey offers it all here.
Also included is Empey’s popular “Tommy’s Dictionary of the Trenches” which humorously demistifies the slang used by the British soldier.
John Wesley Powell was a pioneer American explorer, ethnologist, and geologist in the 19th Century. In 1869 he set out to explore the Colorado and the Grand Canyon. He gathered nine men, four boats and food for ten months and set out from Green River, Wyoming, on May 24. Passing through dangerous rapids, the group passed down the Green River to its confluence with the Colorado River (then also known as the Grand River upriver from the junction), near present-day Moab, Utah.
The expedition’s route traveled through the Utah canyons of the Colorado River, which Powell described in his published diary as having …wonderful features—carved walls, royal arches, glens, alcove gulches, mo...
This autobiographical work describes the author’s harrowing experience caught on a small drifting piece of ice, while crossing a frozen bay by dog team on the Northern Peninsula of Newfoundland.
Considered to mark the emergence of a new literary form, the unvarnished autobiography, Confessions by Jean-Jacques Rousseau was first published in 1782, four years after his death. The philosopher and educationist whose political philosophy is credited with having inspired the French Revolution, Rousseau was a man of immense wit, talent and depth of thinking. His skill in art, music, literature and cooking along with his magnificent body of work in philosophy, politics, education and sociology have made him a legendary figure.
However, through Confessions, he aimed to present a complete picture of himself, exposing all the unsavory and shameful incidents in hi...
Ezra Meeker…was an early pioneer who traveled the Oregon Trail by ox cart as a young man. Beginning in his 70s, he worked tirelessly to memorialize the trail, repeatedly retracing the trip of his youth. This book is a memoir of those days.