The Ark

George Orwell, was an English novelist, essayist, journalist, and critic. His work is characterized by lucid prose, biting social criticism, opposition to totalitarianism, and outspoken support of democratic socialism. Orwell's work remains influential in popular and political culture, and the adjective "Orwellian"-describing totalitarian and authoritarian social practices-is part of the English language, like many of his neologisms, such as "Big...

Ralph Waldo Emerson was an American essayist, lecturer, philosopher, abolitionist, and poet who led the transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century. He was seen as a champion of individualism and a prescient critic of the countervailing pressures of society, and his ideology was disseminated through dozens of published essays and more than 1,500 public lectures across the United States. Emerson gradually moved away from the religious and social...

Authored in 1834 by David Crockett (1786—1836), with some editorial assistance from his congressional colleague from Kentucky, Thomas Chilton, the Narrative of the Life of David Crockett of the State of Tennessee is one of the most significant documents of the American pioneer experience in the first half of the nineteenth century. It describes the author's life from his first memories in eastern Tennessee through his progressive moves westward,...

"The government claimed they had recovered a UFO - they had a press release about it, No other government in the world has said 'We have a spacecraft,' and then the next day there's another press release that says, 'Never mind, it was just a weather balloon'," Ben Smith, former CIA operative In 1947, something crashed outside of Roswell, New Mexico and was brought to Roswell Army Air Field by Army officers. Since then, there have been many a...

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (commonly Alice in Wonderland) is an 1865 English novel by Lewis Carroll. It details the story of a young girl named Alice who falls through a rabbit hole into a fantasy world of anthropomorphic creatures. It is seen as an example of the literary nonsense genre. It received positive reviews upon release and is now one of the best-known works of Victorian literature; its narrative, structure, characters, and imagery...

Themes of love between people of the same gender are found in a variety of texts throughout the world. The Greeks, explored the theme on different levels in works such as Plato's. Religious narratives include stories of sexuality between men or feature divine actions that result in changes in gender. These myths too are forms of LGBTQ expression and modern conceptions of sexuality and gender. Myths too have been used by to explain the "cause" of transgender...

The History of Mr. Polly is a 1910 comic novel by H. G. Wells. The protagonist of The History of Mr. Polly is an antihero inspired by H. G. Wells's early experiences in the drapery trade: Alfred Polly, born circa 1870, a timid and directionless young man living in Edwardian England, who despite his own bumbling achieves contented serenity with little help from those around him. Mr. Polly's most striking characteristic is his "innate sense of epithet",...

Dive into the life of a normal man with a normal family in this humorous novel told in diary entries from one Charles Pooter: husband, father, and someone, who experiences relatable social embarrassments and humiliations. As he chronicles a year in his life, he discusses his twenty-year-old son's foray into the dating scene, the couple's attempts at blending in with higher society, and his general interactions with friends and co-workers. Originally...

Tells the story of Bathsheba Everdene, who must choose among three suitors in Wessex in the 1840s.

A detailed biography of Thomas Alva Edison, inventor of such things as the telephone, the microphone, the electric motor, the storage battery, and the electric light. In the words of the authors, "It is designed in these pages to bring the reader face to face with Edison; to glance at an interesting childhood and a youthful period marked by a capacity for doing things, and by an insatiable thirst for knowledge; then to accompany him into the great...