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A First Book in American History
The main peculiarity of the present book is that it aims to teach children the history of the country by making them acquainted with some of the most illustrious actors in it. A child is interested, above all, in persons. Biography is for him the natural door into history. The order of events in a nation's life is somewhat above the reach of younger pupils, but the course of human life and the personal achievements of an individual are intelligible and delightful.
In teaching younger pupils by means of biography, which is the very alphabet of history, we are following a sound principle often forgotten, that primary education should be pursued along the line of the least resistance.
More info →History of Modern Mathematics
This little work was published as a chapter in Merriman and Woodward’s Higher Mathematics. It was written before the numerous surveys of the development of science in the past hundred years, which appeared at the close of the nineteenth century, and it therefore had more reason for being then than now, save as it can now call attention, to these later contributions. The conditions under which it was published limited it to such a small compass that it could do no more than present a list of the most prominent names in connection with a few important topics. Since it is necessary to use the same plates in this edition, simply adding a few new pages, the body of the work remains substantially as it first appeared. The book therefore makes no claim to being history, but stands simply as an outline of the prominent movements in mathematics, presenting a few of the leading names, and calling attention to some of the bibliography of the subject.
More info →A History of Mathematics
The contemplation of the various steps by which mankind has come into possession of the vast stock of mathematical knowledge can hardly fail to interest the mathematician. He takes pride in the fact that his science, more than any other, is an exact science, and that hardly anything ever done in mathematics has proved to be useless.
The chemist smiles at the childish efforts of alchemists, but the mathematician finds the geometry of the Greeks and the arithmetic of the Hindoos as useful and admirable as any research of today. He is pleased to notice that though, in course of its development, mathematics has had periods of slow growth, yet in the main it has been pre-eminently a progressive science.
More info →Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte: Complete & Illustrated
The Memoirs of the time of Napoleon may be divided into two classes—those by marshals and officers, of which Suchet's is a good example, chiefly devoted to military movements, and those by persons employed in the administration and in the Court, giving us not only materials for history, but also valuable details of the personal and inner life of the great Emperor and of his immediate surroundings. Of this latter class the Memoirs of Bourrienne are among the most important.
More info →Tragedy of Julius Caesar
The Tragedy of Julius Caesar is a tragedy by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written in 1599. It portrays the 44 BC conspiracy against the Roman dictator Julius Caesar, his assassination and the defeat of the conspirators at the Battle of Philippi. It is one of several plays written by Shakespeare based on true events from Roman history, which also include Coriolanus and Antony and Cleopatra.
Although the title is Julius Caesar, Julius Caesar is not the most visible character in its action; he appears in only five scenes. Marcus Brutus speaks more than four times as many lines, and the central psychological drama is his struggle between the conflicting demands of honor, patriotism, and friendship.
Odyssey
The Odyssey begins ten years after the end of the ten-year Trojan War (that is the subject of the Iliad), and Odysseus has still not returned home from the war. Odysseus' son Telemachus is about 20 years old and is sharing his absent father’s house on the island of Ithaca with his mother Penelope and a crowd of 108 boisterous young men, "the Suitors", whose aim is to persuade Penelope to marry one of them, all the while enjoying the hospitality of Odysseus' household and eating up his wealth. Odysseus’ protectress, the goddess Athena, discusses his fate with Zeus, king of the gods, at a moment when Odysseus' enemy, the god of the sea Poseidon, is absent from Mount Olympus. Then, disguised as a Taphian chieftain named Mentes, she visits Telemachus to urge him to search for news of his father. He offers her hospitality; they observe the Suitors dining rowdily while the bard Phemius performs a narrative poem for them. Penelope objects to Phemius' theme, the "Return from Troy".
More info →Common Sense
In 1776, writer Thomas Paine publishes his pamphlet “Common Sense,” setting forth his arguments in favor of American independence. Although little used today, pamphlets were an important medium for the spread of ideas in the 16th through 19th centuries.
More info →Caesar and Cleopatra
Caesar is alone at night in the Egyptian desert, apostrophizing a statue of the Sphinx. Caesar is startled when a young girl, Cleopatra, addresses him from the paws of the Sphinx. He climbs up to her, thinking he is dreaming. She is full of superstitions about cats and Nile water. She tells Caesar she is there because the Romans are coming to eat her people. Caesar sees that he is not dreaming and identifies himself to Cleopatra as a Roman.
More info →Evolution of Communism
The beginning story of the communism was like this:
A ghost walks in Europe - the ghost of communism. All the forces of old Europe entered into a sacred alliance to defeat this ghost: the Pope and the Tsar, Metternich and Guizot, French radicals and German police agents.
Where is the opposition party not being accused of being communist by its opponents? Where is the opposition, which has not thrown this blightful communism accusation back to its reactionary adversaries as well as to the more progressive opposition parties?
More info →A Short History of Science
The present book, while in part a revision of Sedgwick and Tyler's Short History of Science, is to a great extent new. Like the earlier work, it is the outgrowth of a course of lectures given for a number of years to undergraduates at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Doctor Sedgwick having died some years after the publication of the first edition, the surviving author undertook the preparation of a revised edition and invited R. P. Bigelow, who had taken part in the lecture course, to share the editorial responsibility in cooperation with colleagues verse in other fields.
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