In 1906, William Jennings Bryan, himself a famous American orator, and Francis Whiting Halsey published a series of the most famous orations of all time. They are ordered by both geographic area and time period, ranging from Ancient Greece to their...

The word technocracy refers to a system of government by technical experts such as scientists, technologists, and engineers. William Henry Smyth is often thought to have invented the term in 1919, although it had in fact been used earlier. (Summary...

Savage bears, a river rescue, capture by Indians, escape on wild mustangs and a revolutionary battle await the protagonists of this suspenseful adventure novel, set in California. (Summary by Lynne Thompson)...

Kipling was one of the most popular writers in the United Kingdom, in both prose and verse, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In 1907, at the age of 42, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, making him the first English-language...

Four most fashionable doctors are called in by Sganarelle to cure his daughter, but instead they argue about everything and Sganarelle is driven to the streets where he finds a quack and his daughter's disguised lover. Moliere: "This is only a...

Fans of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women will remember that her heroine Jo wrote racy novels before turning her hand to more "serious" literature. Alcott, writing under the pseudonym A. M. Barnard, often did the same, and Behind a Mask (1866) is one...

LibriVox volunteers bring you 6 different recordings of Warble for Lilac-Time by Walt Whitman....

This is a Nursery Rhyme Book with lots of delightful short, rhyming stories that are meant to be read aloud to small children. They are vintage rhymes, most from the 1800s. Each section has about 5 minutes of rhymes....

In this volume of adventure the author depicts the lives of certain humble modern heroes whose unconscious courage ordinarily goes unnoticed. Mr. Moffett has chosen unusual and picturesque careers, and has offered dramatic scenes from the lives of...

What is the secret of the old boarded up house? And what is the answer to the mystery of the long lost letter that is found in it? Best friends Joyce and Cynthia - along with their dog "Goliath", are determined to find out in this pre-Nancy Drew...

One of the earliest works by the American parodist, Guy Wetmore Carryl, these fables are adapted from Jean de La Fontaine’s original writings. The fables are written in verse, and are light-hearted re-tellings of fables from two centuries before,...

And so we present the 83rd installment of the Librivox Short Story Collection! Each tale is selected and read by a Librivox volunteer. This compendium includes works by Edith Nesbit, Oscar Wilde, Guy de Maupassant and Lord Dunsany, to name but a few....

Librivox’s Short Mystery Story Collection 003: a collection of 10 short works of mysterious fiction in the public domain read by a group of LibriVox members....

This Side of Paradise is the debut novel of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Published in 1920, and taking its title from a line of the Rupert Brooke poem Tiare Tahiti, the book examines the lives and morality of post-World War I youth. Its protagonist, Amory...

This is a volume of poetry by the English poet Charles Stuart Calverley. Calverley was considered quite a wit during his life time, and this disposition shines through in some of these poems as well. - Summary by Carolin...

Archibald Primrose, 5th Earl of Rosebery, liberal prime minister (1894-1895), wrote this short biography of William Pitt, the Younger (1759-1806), the controversial young prime minister who led Great Britain during the terrible trial of the...

A promising young writer meets an older man whose works have inspired him, as well as a highly intelligent and attractive young woman, at a gathering in a country house. Anxious to learn all he can from the older writer, the young man seeks his...

This is a collection of the best short stories about girls published in Harper's Magazine from 1895 to 1906. The girls in these stories are not the typical 'girl' from late 19th century novels. They are..different. They are actually [gasp] real...

'Cut a large old hare in small pieces, and put it in a mug with three blades of mace, a little salt, two large onions, one red herring, six morels, half a pint of red wine, three quarts of water, bake it in a quick oven three hours...'. English...

A summary of Lutheran doctrine, written by Martin Luther in 1537 for a meeting of the Schmalkaldic League in preparation for an intended ecumenical Council of the Church. Luther's patron, Elector John Frederick of Saxony, asked him to prepare these...