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The published dictionary was a huge book: with pages nearly 1½ feet tall and 20 inches wide, it contained 42,773 words; it also sold for the huge price of £4/10s. ($400?). It would be years before Johnson's Dictionary, as it came to be known, would ever turn a profit; authors' royalities being unknown at that time, Johnson, once his contract to deliver the book was fulfilled, received no further monies connected to the book. Johnson, once again a freelance writer, albeit now a famous one, faced a grim hand-to-mouth existence; however, in July 1762 the twenty-four year old King George III granted Johnson an annual pension of £300. While not making Johnson rich, it allowed him a modest yet comfortable independence for the remaining thirty years of his life. (Summary from Wikipedia)....

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History, Languages

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This is the autobiography of Elizabeth Keckley, a former slave who bought her freedom with the money she earned as a seamstress. She eventually worked for Mary Lincoln. It is a fascinating book, filled with many recollections of her own life and her interactions with the Lincolns and other members of the government elite. (summary by Guero)...

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History, Memoirs, Biography

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Cyrus W. Field had a dream: to link the Old World of Britain and Europe to that of the New World of North America by a telegraph cable stretching across the great Atlantic Ocean. It took him thirteen years, a lot of money, and many men and ships and cable to make it happen. He wanted to bring the world together and make it a smaller place; to forge alliances and achieve peace. This is his story. (Introduction by Alex C. Telander)...

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History, Science

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The book chronicles and vilifies its targets in three parts: National Delusions, Peculiar Follies, and Philosophical Delusions. The subjects of Mackay's debunking include alchemy, beards (influence of politics and religion on), witch-hunts, crusades and duels. Present day writers on economics, such as Andrew Tobias, laud the three chapters on economic bubbles. (summary from wikipedia)...

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History, Essay/Short nonfiction

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Geronimo’s Story of His Life is the oral life history of a legendary Apache warrior. Composed in 1905, while Geronimo was being held as a U.S. prisoner of war at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, Geronimo’s story found audience and publication through the efforts of S. M. Barrett--Lawton, Oklahoma, Superintendent of Education, who wrote in his preface that “the initial idea of the compilation of this work was . . . to extend to Geronimo as a prisoner of war the courtesy due any captive, i.e. the right to state the causes which impelled him in his opposition to our civilization and laws.” Barrett, with the assistance of Asa Deklugie, son of Nedni chief Whoa as Apache translator, wrote down the story as Geronimo told it --beginning with an Apache creation myth. Geronimo recounted bloody battles with Mexican troopers, against whom he had vowed vengeance in 1858 after they murdered his mother, his wife, and his three small children. He told of treaties made between Apaches and the U.S. Army--and treaties broken. There were periods of confinement on the reservations, and escapes. And there were his final days on the run, when the U.S. Army put 5000 m...

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Biography, History

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volunteers bring you 13 recordings of Longings for Home by Walt Whitman. This was the Weekly Poetry project for August 26, 2012. Born on Long Island, Whitman worked as a journalist, a teacher, a government clerk, and – in addition to publishing his poetry – was a volunteer nurse during the American Civil War. Early in his career, he also produced a temperance novel, Franklin Evans (1842). Whitman's major work, Leaves of Grass, was first published in 1855 with his own money. The work was an attempt at reaching out to the common person with an American epic. He continued expanding and revising it until his death in 1892. After a stroke towards the end of his life, he moved to Camden, New Jersey, where his health further declined. He died at age 72 and his funeral became a public spectacle. ( Summary from Wikipedia )...

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Adventure, History, Memoirs, Nature, Poetry

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Brooks Adams (1848- 1927), was an American historian and a critic of capitalism. He believed that commercial civilizations rise and fall in predictable cycles. First, masses of people draw together in large population centers and engage in commercial activities. As their desire for wealth grows, they discard spiritual and creative values. Their greed leads to distrust and dishonesty, and eventually the society crumbles. In The Law of Civilisation and Decay (1895), Adams noted that as new population centers emerged in the west, centers of world trade shifted from Constantinople to Venice to Amsterdam to London. He predicted in America’s Economic Supremacy (1900) that New York would become the centre for world trade. The Theory of Social Revolutions was written in 1913. (Wikipedia)...

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Politics, History

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In this volume are presented examples of men who shed lustre upon ordinary pursuits, either by the superior manner in which they exercised them or by the noble use they made of the leisure which success in them usually gives. Such men are the nobility of republics. Most of these chapters were published originally in The Ledger of New York, and a few of them in The Youths' Companion of Boston, the largest two circulations in the country. I have occasionally had reason to think that they were of some service to young readers, and I may add that they represent more labor and research than would be naturally supposed from their brevity. Perhaps in this new form they may reach and influence the minds of future leaders in the great and growing realm of business. I should pity any young man who could read the briefest account of what has been done in manufacturing towns by such men as John Smedley and Robert Owen without forming a secret resolve to do something similar if ever he should win the opportunity. (Summary by Preface)...

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Children, History, Biography

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Peter Kropotkin was a Russian anarcho-communist and scientist. This is his autobiography, and he writes not only about his own life, but also about 19th century Russian society and politics. He was born into the nobility and had a military education, but he gradually abandoned the values of his social class and became an anti-authoritarian socialist, opposed to both the rule of the Tsars and to the seizing of power by the authoritarian Bolsheviks. He was also interested in literature, biology, economics and geographical exploration. This second and last volume of his memoirs covers his time in St Petersburg, his time in prison, and his journeys in Western Europe. ( Summary by Elin )...

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Biography, History

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In the 1880s William Morris, the artist and poet famously associated with the Arts and Crafts movement, left the Liberal Party and threw himself into the Socialist cause. He spoke all over the country, on street corners as well as in working men's clubs and lecture halls, and edited and wrote for the Socialist League's monthly newspaper. Signs of Change is a short collection of his talks and writings in this period, first published in 1888, covering such topics as what socialism and work should be, and how capitalism and waste developed. (Summary by Deborah Brabyn)...

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Economics/Political Economy, History, Politics

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Read in English, this is a pivotal document in the history of Zionism and the State of Israel. Herzl designed this work to elevate the discussion of the Jewish Question so it would no longer take the form of violent abuse or sentimental vindication but of a debate, practical, large, earnest, and political. While few of Herzl's proposals were actually carried out, the importance of A JEWISH STATE was in the groundswell of support for a Jewish homeland engendered by its solutions to the practical problems of establishing a new state. In the words of a contemporary, [Herzl] made it seem possible. Benjamin Ze’ev Herzl (1860-1904) was a Hungarian writer, political economist, and Jewish activist. (Summary by Adrian Praetzellis)...

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Economics/Political Economy, History, Religion

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After the American Civil War, John R. Lynch, who had been a slave in Mississippi, began his political career in 1869 by first becoming Justice of the Peace, and then Mississippi State Representative. He was only 26 when he was elected to the US Congress in 1873. There, he continued to be an activist, introducing many bills and arguing on their behalf. Perhaps his greatest effort was in the long debate supporting the Civil Rights Act of 1875 to ban discrimination in public accommodations. In 1884 Lynch was the first African American nominated after a moving speech by Theodore Roosevelt to the position of Temporary Chairman of the Republican National Convention in Chicago, Illinois. During the Spanish-American War of 1898, he was appointed Treasury Auditor and then Paymaster under the Republicans. In 1901, he began serving with the Regular Army with tours of duty in the United States, Cuba, and the Philippines. Lynch retired from the Army in 1911, then married Cora Williams. They moved to Chicago, where he practiced law. He also became involved in real estate. After his death in Chicago 1939 at the age of 92, he was buried with milita...

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Economics/Political Economy, History, Memoirs, Politics