Category: Entertainment & Performing Arts
How To Become A Successful Magician
If you have ever wanted to know how to become a magician, you have found the answer! If you seriously want to learn to become a magician and want to learn magic tricks to amaze your friends and family members, you have come to the right place! Many want to become a magician but don’t […]
Standup Comedy
Well, here’s your chance to try it out for size. Just think, you are making jokes and everyone is laughing. As you were growing up, you kept your friends, family and classmates in stitches. They would fall over whenever you told a joke. They couldn’t get enough of them and always wanted you to keep […]
The Youth of Jefferson; or, A Chronicle of College Scrapes at Williamsburg, in Virginia, A.D. 1764
First published in 1854, this anonymous work may have been written by John Esten Cooke (1830-1886). It begins: ‘On a fine May morning in the year 1764, -that is to say, between the peace at Fontainebleau and the stamp act agitation, which great events have fortunately no connection with the present narrative, -a young man […]
William Penn
William Penn (October 14, 1644 – July 30, 1718) was an English founder and ‘Absolute Proprietor’ of the Province of Pennsylvania, the English North American colony and the future U.S. State of Pennsylvania. He was known as an early champion of democracy and religious freedom and famous for his good relations and his treaties with […]
William the Conqueror
Professor Edward Augustus Freeman (1823-1892) was an English historian. Ecclesiastical architecture was his great interest. He visited many churches and began a practice of making drawings of buildings on the spot and afterwards tracing them over in ink. His first book, save for his share in a volume of English verse, was a History of […]
William the Conqueror
Jacob Abbott (1803-1879) was an American writer of children’s books. He was a prolific author, writing juvenile fiction, brief histories, biographies, religious books for the general reader, and a few works in popular science. His Rollo Books, such as Rollo at Work (1837) and Rollo at Play (1837) are the best known of his writings, […]
White Queen of the Cannibals: The Story of Mary Slessor of Calabar
Mary Slessor (1848-1915) was a Scottish missionary to Nigeria. In 1876, she applied to the Foreign Mission Board of the United Presbyterian Church of Scotland. She was briefly trained before being sent to Calabar where she arrived in September. Mary shocked many missionaries by living with and as the locals. She learned to speak Efik […]
Vasco Nunez De Balboa
Frederick Albion Ober (1849-1913) was an American author, travel writer, biographer and historian. He was occupied as a shoemaker (1862-1866) and subsequently attended the Massachusetts Agricultural College but due to the lack of funds was forced to leave after only a short time. In 1876 he began making ornithological surveys to the Lesser Antilles where […]
The Use and Need of the Life of Carry A. Nation
Carrie Amelia Nation (1846-1911) was a member of the temperance movement – the battles against alcohol in pre-Prohibition America. She has been the topic of numerous books, articles and even a 1966 opera at the University of Kansas. Born Carrie Moore in Garrard County, Kentucky, Nation got her myth-making last name from her second husband, […]
Ulysses S. Grant
Ulysses S. Grant (born Hiram Ulysses Grant) (1822- 1885) was general-in-chief of the Union Army from 1864 to 1865 during the American Civil War. Popular due to the Union victory, Grant was elected 18th President of the United States as a Republican in 1868 and was re-elected in 1872, the first President to serve for […]
Tupelo
Rev. John Hill Aughey (1828-1911) was an American author. He was a Presbyterian minister working in Mississippi up to Secession of the Southern States. He was imprisoned and condemned to execution by the brutal officials of the South for his outspoken anti-Secession and pro-Union beliefs. He made a miraculous escape, to report the details of […]
The Sunny Side of Diplomatic Life, 1875-1912
Lillie De Hegermann-Lindencrone, (1844-1928), born Lillie Greenough in Cambridge, Massachusetts and later known as Lillie Moulton, was a trained singer, and latterly a diplomat’s wife noted for publishing in 1913 a book of letters describing The Sunny Side of Diplomatic Life, 1875-1912. She was, by her own description, a friend and favourite of a number […]
The Story of the Herschels
Sir Frederick William Herschel, FRS KH (1738- 1822) was a German-born British astronomer and composer who became famous for discovering Uranus. He also discovered infrared radiation and made many other discoveries in astronomy. His sister Caroline Lucretia Herschel (1750-1848) came to England in 1772 and lived with him in Bath. She was also an astronomer […]
The Story of Ida Pfeiffer and Her Travels in Many Lands
Ida Laura Pfeiffer, nee Reyer (1797-1858), was an Austrian traveller and travel book author. She was one of the first female explorers, whose popular books were translated into seven languages. She was a member of geographical societies of both Berlin and Paris, but not of Royal Geographical Society in London due to her sex. In […]
The Story of Burnt Njal: The Great Icelandic Tribune, Jurist, and Counsellor
There was a man named Mord whose surname was Fiddle; he was the son of Sigvat the Red, and he dwelt at the ‘Vale’ in the Rangrivervales. He was a mighty chief, and a great taker up of suits, and so great a lawyer that no judgments were thought lawful unless he had a hand […]
The Story of Cole Younger, by Himself
Thomas Coleman ‘Cole’ Younger (1844-1916) was a famous Confederate guerrilla and outlaw. During the American Civil War, Cole’s father, Henry Younger, who reportedly was pro-Union, was killed by a detachment of Union militiamen. Younger joined the notorious bushwhacker leader William Clarke Quantrill and later became a pro-Confederate Soldier. After the war ended, he and his […]
Stephen A. Douglas: A Study in American Politics
The Stephens Family: A Genealogy of the Descendants of Joshua Stevens
Joshua Stephens, Jr. (1733-1823) the ancestor of this Stephens Family, was born, according to the family tradition, in what is now the County of Berkes, in the State of Pennsylvania, of Welsh parents, A. D. 1733. According to the recollection of C. C. Stephens, his grandfather, E. D. Stephens, son of this Joshua Stephens, stated […]
Starr King in California
William Day Simonds (1855-1920) was an American author and historian. His works include: Sermons From Shakespeare (1898), Patriotic Addresses (? ), The Christ of the Human Heart (1911) and Starr King in California (1917). Thomas Starr King (1824-1864) was an American Unitarian minister, influential in California politics during the American Civil War. He spoke zealously […]
Something of Men I Have Known
Adlai Ewing Stevenson I (1835-1914) was a Congressman from Illinois. He was admitted to the bar in 1858, at age 23, and commenced practice in Metamora, in Woodford County, Illinois. He was appointed master in chancery (an aide in a court of equity), his first public office, which he held during the Civil War. In […]
A Soldier’s Life: Being the Personal Reminiscences of Edwin G. Rundle
A Soldier’s Life (1909) is the personal reminiscences of Sergeant-Major Edwin George Rundle (1838-? ). In Sergeant-Major Rundle’s narrative we have the interesting story of how an honest English boy became attracted to the colors; how the British army lives, moves and has its being in the British Isles and in the Dominions beyond the […]
Six Years in the Prisons of England
In the beginning of the year 1856 I commenced business on my own account, as a merchant in a Northern City. Previous to that time I had been engaged in an unsuccessful partnership, but I paid my creditors in full with the small capital advanced to me by my friends for the purpose of my […]
Sir Walter Ralegh
William Stebbing (1832-1926) was the British author of: Analysis of Mr. Mill’s System of Logic (1875), Sir Walter Ralegh (1891) and Some Verdicts of History Reviewed. He was formerly fellow of Worcester College, Oxford. ‘Students of Ralegh’s career cannot complain of a dearth of materials. For thirty-seven years he lived in the full glare of […]
Select Speeches of Kossuth
Lajos Kossuth (1802-1894) was a Hungarian lawyer, politician and Regent-President of the Kingdom of Hungary in 1849. He was widely honoured during his lifetime, including in the United Kingdom and the United States, as a freedom fighter. Kossuth was the leader of the European revolution; his speech was read aloud in the streets of Vienna […]
Rulers of India: Akbar
Robert and Louisa Stewart: In Life and in Death
Robert Warren Stewart and his wife Louisa were Anglican Church missionaries to China. They were murdered during the Kucheng Massacre of Western Christians that took place at Gutian, Fujian, China on August 1, 1895. At dawn of that day, Vegetarian rebels in Gutian (also known as ‘Kucheng’ in Foochowese) made an attack upon British missionaries […]
Rob Roy
Sir Walter Scott, 1st Baronet (1771-1832) was a prolific Scottish historical novelist and poet popular throughout Europe during his time. In some ways Scott was the first author to have a truly international career in his lifetime, with many contemporary readers all over Europe, Australia, and North America. His novels and poetry are still read, […]
Right Above Race
Reminiscences of a Rebel
Wayland Fuller Dunaway (1841-1916) was an American soldier, lawyer, minister, historian and author. He studied law at the University of Virginia. In 1861 he joined the Confederate army. He had been a captain in Co. I, 40th Virginia, when captured during the Battle of Falling Waters in July 1863. He was imprisioned at the Union […]