Charles Darwin's seminal work 'The Descent of Man' is published here edited and with an introduction by Adrian Desmond and James Moore. Suggestions are provided for further reading, a chronology of Darwin's life and works, and a biographical glossary.

"A Diary From Dixie" is Mary Boykin Chesnut's celebrated firsthand account of life in the Confederate South during the Civil War years of 1861-1865. Chesnut, the wife of a Confederate Senator and Brigadier General described the life of an upper-class planter society confronting the encroaching realities of the end of slavery and her peers' way of life. Full of important personages and eminently readable, the Diary was quoted extensively in Ken Burns'...

"Gabriel Syme must infiltrate and try to thwart an anarchist cell, at whose heart is the mysterious and ambiguous Sunday, a man whose powers seem almost godlike. Syme's mission leads him through the back ways of Victorian London and on a wild chase through the French countryside." --

This edition includes a modern introduction and a list of suggested further reading. Jean-Jacques Rousseau's thesis that children are naturally good at birth violated the traditional Christian doctrine of origin sin. His argument that education should arise from children's natural instincts and impulses rather than trying to civilize and socialize them challenged traditional schooling. Rousseau's defenders see him as a pioneering thinker whose revolutionary...

This edition includes a modern introduction and a list of suggested further reading. When Evan MacIan, a fervent Catholic, becomes enraged by an atheist newspaper, he challenges the editor, James Turnbull, to a duel. Turnbull, just as passionate in his atheism as MacIan is in his Catholicism, eagerly accepts. Their sword fight interrupted wherever they go, MacIan and Turnbull duel with words. The more MacIan and Turnbull debate, the more they realize...

The first novel by Mary Roberts Rinehart, America’s queen of crime
This is the story of how a middle-aged spinster lost her mind, deserted her domestic gods in the city, took a furnished house for the summer out of town, and found herself involved in one of those mysterious crimes that keep our newspapers and detective agencies happy and prosperous.
So says Rachel Innes, the spinster in question and one of the most remarkable...

This edition includes a modern introduction and a list of suggested further reading. Francis Bacon once wrote, "Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested... " This is a book to be chewed and digested, and these essays make as satisfying a meal today as when the first edition was published in 1597. Indeed, the present-day reader is amply rewarded for the effort of taking in the old-fashioned English...

In 1862 military necessity enabled Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton to pry from a hesitant President Lincoln the authority to enlist black troops in the Union army. The pioneer regiment of ex-slaves was to secure the beachhead tenuously held at Beaufort, off the South Carolina coast. The commanding officer chosen for the First South Carolina Volunteers was Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a militant human rights activist, writer and lecturer, and former...

Beyond the Pleasure Principle, published in 1920, by world-renowned psychologist Sigmund Freud, marks a major turning point in the author's theoretical approach. Prior to this work, Freud's examination of the forces that drive people focused primarily on the sexual drive, or Eros of man, the life instinct to reproduce that is innate in all humans. Freud had attributed most of human behavior to the seeking of sexual pleasure. In reasoned progression...

Knut Hamsun believed that modern literature should express the complexity of the human mind and nowhere is that philosophy more evident than in this stunning modern masterpiece, "Hunger." First published in 1890 in Norwegian and based on Hamsun's own experiences with poverty prior to his success as an author, "Hunger" tells the story of an unnamed vagrant who stumbles around the streets of Norway's capital city of Kristiania (now Oslo) looking for...