Harpertorch: 18 books

John Esten Cooke’s A Life of General Robert E. Lee is a biography of the venerable commander of the army of the Confederate States of America. Offered a commission in the Union army by President Lincoln in 1861, the distinguished career officer and combat engineer opted instead to follow...

The Iliad and the Odyssey are attributed to the poet Homer and are the earliest surviving works of Western literature. Composed sometime around the eighth century BC, the ancient Greek poems has since been translated into many languages and serves as an important source of information on ancient Greek...

A Diary from Dixie is the Civil War diary of Mary Boykin Chesnut, society matron and wife of United States senator and Confederate general, James Chesnut, Jr. As an active participant in her husband’s career, accompanying him to postings in Montgomery, Richmond, Charleston, and Columbia, Chesnut...

John Mosby’s War Reminiscences and Stuart’s Cavalry Campaigns is a detailed record of the authors’ service as a Confederate Colonel during the American Civil War. Mosby offers insight into the daring raids and guerilla tactics used by the Confederate army in their doomed struggle against the...

When the Peloponnesian War goes on too long, the women of Athens, led by the beautiful Lysistrata, take matters into their own hands, withholding their passion as a way to force their men to negotiate a peace treaty. But the women’s vow to deny their husbands and lovers does little to force peace,...

In 1847, while in Brussels, the German Communist League asked Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx to draft a pamphlet on the principles of communism. It was published in 1848 under the title Manifesto of the Communist Party, and in it, Marx and Engels discuss the basic communist theories on society, economics,...

This short memoir details Paul Jenning’s memories and impressions of the fourth President of the United States, James Madison. Jennings was born into slavery and in his childhood was trained as a body servant and footman to James Madison. When Madison was elected, Jennings travelled with him to...

Published anonymously in 1729, Jonathan Swift’s satirical essay, A Modest Proposal, puts forth the darkly comical idea that the starving poor of Ireland might alleviate their economic condition by selling their children as food for wealthy gentlemen and ladies. At its core, Swift’s Modest...

One of the first books published after the tragic loss of the Titanic, The Sinking of the Titanic and Great Sea Disasters is a detailed account of the events the night of April 14-15, 1912, and how the tragic loss of life could have been averted. The largest ocean liner of her time, Titanic was on...

First published in 1875, General William T. Sherman’s memoir was one of the first from the Civil War, and was offered to the public because, as Sherman wrote in his dedication, “no satisfactory history” of the war was yet available. Although the Memoirs have been revised and corrected...

Over the course of nine months in 1831 Alexis de Tocqueville, a French political thinker, and accompanied by Gustave de Beaumont, travelled the United States under the pretext of studying the American prison system. Over the course of his travels, Tocqueville also studied American society, religion,...

One of the bloodiest conflicts ever to take place on American soil, the Civil War pitted brother against brother as North and South fought to secure their futures. Confederate president Jefferson Davis’s 1881 memoir, The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government is a history of the Confederate...

On July 4, 1845, Henry David Thoreau began a two-year experiment living in a solitary, self-built hut on the edge of Walden Pond outside of Concord, Massachusetts. In Walden, Thoreau wrote, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and...

A brilliant novel of horror and the supernatural in which a middle-class family’s very existence is threatened by inner and outer demons When Hilton was just a boy, his grandmother sacrificed her life to save him from drowning. Thirty years later, he begins to suspect that he was never meant...