A Christmas Carol. In Prose.
Theme
Money Wealth
144 works in the library take up money wealth, from The Athenian Constitution to Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics, Inc..
Works
A Disquisition on Government is John C. Calhoun's general theory of constitutional government, completed in 1849 in the last year of his life and published in 1851 by his editor Richard K. Crallé as the first part of volume one of his Works. It was meant as the theoretical introduction to a companion study, A Discourse on the Constitution and Government of the United States, which the library text omits.
The title play, A Doll's House (1879), takes place over three days of Christmas in the comfortable Norwegian home of Torvald Helmer, a newly appointed bank manager, and his wife Nora, whom he treats as a charming pet, calling her his songbird and squirrel. Years earlier, when Torvald was gravely ill and doctors advised a year in Italy, Nora secretly borrowed the money from the lawyer Krogstad, forging her dying father's signature as guarantor.
A Little Princess opens on a foggy London day as seven-year-old Sara Crewe rides in a cab with her adoring father, Captain Ralph Crewe, a young officer who has brought her from India to Miss Minchin's Select Seminary for Young Ladies. Because her father is rich, Sara is given a private sitting room, a French maid, a pony and a doll named Emily whom she half believes can walk and talk when no one is looking.
A Model of Christian Charity is a lay sermon or discourse that John Winthrop composed in 1630 for the company of Puritan emigrants he was leading from England to Massachusetts Bay. The surviving heading says it was written in his passage across the Atlantic, and it has traditionally been pictured as preached aboard the flagship Arbella, though some historians think it was delivered before the fleet sailed or circulated in manuscript.
A Theory of Justice is the major work of the American philosopher John Rawls, published by the Belknap Press of Harvard University Press in 1971 after nearly two decades of articles on the same themes. Rawls sets out to offer an alternative to utilitarianism, the view that the right policy is whatever produces the greatest total happiness, which he thought had dominated modern moral and political philosophy.
A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys is Nathaniel Hawthorne's first book of Greek myths retold for children. Six stories are set inside a frame: Eustace Bright, an eighteen-year-old Williams College student on vacation, tells them to a crowd of children staying at Tanglewood, a country house in the Berkshires, whom Hawthorne gives flower and plant names such as Primrose, Periwinkle, Sweet Fern, Dandelion, Squash-Blossom and Buttercup.
In June 1933, deep in the Depression, Congress passed the National Industrial Recovery Act. Its first title authorized the President to approve codes of fair competition for trades and industries, usually drafted by trade associations, and made violation of an approved code a federal misdemeanor.
The petitioner, Aaron, was a managerial employee of E. L. Aaron & Co., a New York broker-dealer that made a market in the stock of Lawn-A-Mat Chemical & Equipment Corp., a seller of lawn-care franchises. He supervised the firm's salesmen and kept its due diligence files.
Amos Fortune, Free Man is a biographical novel about a real man who was born in Africa around 1710, enslaved in Massachusetts, and died free in Jaffrey, New Hampshire, in 1801. Its ten chapters carry dates.
In the 1990s scientists at Myriad Genetics, a Salt Lake City company, determined the location and nucleotide sequence of two human genes, BRCA1 and BRCA2. Certain mutations in these genes greatly raise a woman's risk of breast and ovarian cancer, and knowledge of the sequences allowed Myriad to build tests that detect those mutations.
On 18 September 1895 the Cotton States and International Exposition opened in Atlanta, a fair meant to display the industrial recovery of the South thirty years after the Civil War. Its organizers, who had included a Negro Building among the exhibits, invited Booker T. Washington, principal of Tuskegee Institute, to speak at the opening ceremonies.
Franklin's Autobiography and Poor Richard's Almanack present the founding era through self-fashioning, practical wisdom, and the culture of improvement. The Autobiography narrates Franklin's movement from Boston apprentice to Philadelphia printer, civic organizer, scientist, and public man.
The Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie is the steel manufacturer's own story of his life, written mostly in summers at a cottage in the Scottish Highlands after his retirement and left unfinished when the First World War began in August 1914. His widow, Louise Whitfield Carnegie, contributes a preface, and Professor John C. Van Dyke, who arranged the manuscript, adds an editor's note and footnotes; the book appeared in 1920, the year after Carnegie's death.
John Barron and John Craig owned a profitable wharf on the eastern side of Baltimore harbor, where deep water had let large ships tie up and unload. In the course of paving streets and regrading the town, the city of Baltimore turned the courses of several streams, which then carried sand and earth down into the harbor and left the water at the wharf too shallow for most vessels.
Basic Incorporated, a maker of chemical refractories for the steel industry, had long attracted the interest of Combustion Engineering, Inc. Beginning in September 1976, Combustion's representatives met and spoke with Basic's officers and directors about a possible merger.
Black Beauty: His Grooms and Companions, subtitled 'The Autobiography of a Horse', is narrated by a handsome black horse with a white star and one white foot. He grows up in a pleasant meadow under a kind master, Farmer Grey, and his mother Duchess teaches him to be gentle and good and to work willingly.
Bleak House is built around Jarndyce and Jarndyce, an endless lawsuit over a disputed will in the Court of Chancery, and around a secret that links a great lady to an orphan girl. Dickens tells it in two voices: an unnamed narrator in the present tense who surveys London's fog, the lawcourts, fashionable society and the slum called Tom-all-Alone's, and Esther Summerson, who writes her own story modestly in the past tense.
BUtterfield 8, named for a fashionable Manhattan telephone exchange, is set in New York in 1931, in the last years of Prohibition and the early Depression, among speakeasies, apartment hotels and the blurred borderland between respectable society and its demimonde. Its central figure is Gloria Wandrous, a beautiful, intelligent young woman who drinks heavily, sleeps with men who interest her and lives partly on their generosity, while refusing to see herself as a kept woman or a prostitute.
Caps for Sale, subtitled A Tale of a Peddler, Some Monkeys and Their Monkey Business, is a picture book about a cap seller who carries his whole stock on his head. He wears his own checked cap first, then a bunch of gray caps, then brown ones, then blue ones, and on the very top a bunch of red caps, and he walks very straight so they will not fall.
Captains Courageous begins in the smoking-room of a transatlantic liner in fog, where fifteen-year-old Harvey Cheyne, the spoiled only son of an American railroad and shipping millionaire, brags about his pocket money and annoys the grown men. Sick from a strong cigar, he goes out on deck, is pitched overboard by a roll of the ship, and is pulled out of the sea by Manuel, a Portuguese fisherman in a dory from the Gloucester schooner We're Here.
Sallust wrote two short monographs on episodes of the late Roman Republic, each opened by a philosophical preface and each meant to show how ambition and greed were corrupting the state. The library text is the Rev. John Selby Watson's literal English version, with his argument (chapter outline) before each work and his explanatory notes after it.
Centesimus Annus marks the hundredth anniversary of Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum and reads the social question through the upheavals of the twentieth century. John Paul II returns first to 1891: industrial labor, socialist agitation, private property, wages, association, and the rights of workers.
In 1785 the Massachusetts legislature incorporated the Proprietors of the Charles River Bridge to span the river between Boston and Charlestown, where Harvard College had held a ferry right since 1650. The charter let the proprietors collect tolls for forty years and required them to pay the college two hundred pounds a year for the loss of its ferry; in 1792, when a second bridge to Cambridge was authorized, the term was lengthened to seventy years.
Vincent Chiarella worked as a markup man in the New York composing room of Pandick Press, a financial printer. In 1975 and 1976 he handled five announcements of corporate takeover bids.
Villehardouin's chronicle is the eyewitness account of the Fourth Crusade by one of its leaders. It opens in 1198-99 with the preaching of Fulk of Neuilly and the indulgence proclaimed by Pope Innocent III, and with a tournament at Écry in Champagne where Count Thibaut of Champagne and Count Louis of Blois take the cross, soon joined by Count Baldwin of Flanders.
On 23 April 1910 Theodore Roosevelt, a year out of the presidency and fresh from a long hunting expedition in East Africa, addressed a packed hall at the Sorbonne in Paris. He spoke as the citizen of one great republic to the citizens of another, and his subject was the character that self-government demands of ordinary people.
Cranford is a small English country town, twenty miles by railway from the busy commercial city of Drumble, where nearly every householder of the better sort is a single lady or a widow. The narrator, Mary Smith, a young woman from Drumble, visits often and describes their code: calls of exactly fifteen minutes, card parties with wafer bread-and-butter, and an 'elegant economy' that treats spending as vulgar and never names poverty.
David Copperfield is the first-person autobiography of a novelist looking back on his life. David is born at Blunderstone in Suffolk six months after his father's death, on a night when his formidable great-aunt Betsey Trotwood storms out on learning he is not a girl.
Death of a Salesman: Certain Private Conversations in Two Acts and a Requiem covers the last twenty-four hours or so of Willy Loman, a sixty-three-year-old travelling salesman, interwoven with his memories and imaginings of the past. Willy returns early to his small Brooklyn house, now hemmed in by apartment buildings, because he can no longer keep the car on the road: his mind keeps drifting.
In 1972 Ananda Mohan Chakrabarty, a microbiologist working for the General Electric Company, applied for a patent on a bacterium of the genus Pseudomonas into which he had introduced plasmids, hereditary units outside the chromosome, that allowed it to break down several components of crude oil. No natural bacterium had this combined capacity.
In March 1973 Raymond Dirks, an officer of a New York broker-dealer who analyzed insurance company securities for institutional investors, received a call from Ronald Secrist, a former officer of Equity Funding Corporation of America. Secrist said that the company's assets were vastly overstated through fraud, that regulators had ignored similar warnings, and that Dirks should verify the charges and make them public.
The Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men is Jean-Jacques Rousseau's answer to a prize question set by the Academy of Dijon in 1753: what is the origin of inequality among men, and is it authorized by natural law? Rousseau's essay did not win the prize, but it was printed at Amsterdam by Marc-Michel Rey in 1755 with a dedication to the Republic of Geneva, a preface and extensive notes.
Ernst & Ernst, an accounting firm, audited First Securities Company of Chicago, a small brokerage house, from 1946 through 1967 and prepared the annual reports the firm filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Leston B. Nay, the brokerage's president and owner of 92 percent of its stock, persuaded certain customers to put money into special escrow accounts that he said would pay a high return.
Farmer Boy tells about a year and more in the boyhood of Almanzo Wilder, the author's future husband, on his family's prosperous farm near Malone in northern New York in the 1860s. Almanzo is almost nine when the book opens in January, walking to the schoolhouse with his brother Royal and his sisters Eliza Jane and Alice.
Father Goriot opens in 1819 in the Maison Vauquer, a shabby boarding house in the Rue Neuve-Sainte-Geneviève on the poor edge of the Latin Quarter, which Balzac describes room by room, smell by smell, before introducing its lodgers. Among them are Eugène de Rastignac, a law student from a poor noble family near Angoulême; the hearty, mocking Vautrin, who claims to be a retired merchant; the spinster Mlle.
Franklin Roosevelt was inaugurated on Saturday, 4 March 1933, at the low point of the Great Depression. About a quarter of the work force was unemployed, farm prices had collapsed, and in the weeks before the ceremony a wave of bank runs had led governors in most states to close or restrict their banks.
Cyril, Anthea, Robert, and Jane, with their baby brother the Lamb, have come from two years in Camden Town to a white house in the Kent countryside near Rochester, between a chalk-quarry and a gravel-pit. Their father is called away on business and their mother goes to nurse their sick grandmother, leaving them in the care of the nursemaid Martha and the other servants.
In January 1795 the Georgia legislature sold roughly thirty-five million acres of its western lands, much of present Alabama and Mississippi, to four land companies for $500,000. It soon emerged that nearly every legislator who voted for the sale had been promised shares or money by the purchasers.
Freedom and the Law is a short book of legal and political philosophy by the Italian jurist Bruno Leoni, based on lectures he gave at Claremont Men's College in California in 1958 at a summer institute on freedom and competitive enterprise. It was published in English in 1961 by D. Van Nostrand in the William Volker Fund series in the humane studies.
After Robert Fulton's steamboat made its run up the Hudson in 1807, the New York legislature confirmed and extended an exclusive right, held by Fulton and Robert R. Livingston, to navigate all state waters with vessels propelled by steam. Anyone else needed their license.
In June 1961 someone broke into the Bay Harbor Poolroom in Panama City, Florida, and took coins from a cigarette machine and a jukebox. Clarence Earl Gideon, a fifty-one-year-old drifter with a record of earlier convictions, was charged with breaking and entering with intent to commit a misdemeanor, a felony under Florida law.
In 1996 California voters approved Proposition 215, the Compassionate Use Act, which exempted from state prosecution seriously ill patients and their caregivers who possessed or grew marijuana for medical use on a physician's recommendation. Angel Raich and Diane Monson, two California residents with serious medical conditions, used marijuana on the advice of their doctors.
Great Expectations is the first-person story of Philip Pirrip, called Pip, an orphan brought up by hand by his harsh elder sister and her gentle husband Joe Gargery, the village blacksmith on the Kent marshes. On Christmas Eve, in the churchyard where his parents lie, an escaped convict seizes Pip and makes him bring a file and food; Pip steals both from his sister's house, and the convict is later recaptured struggling with another fugitive.
This anthology gathers three state papers that Alexander Hamilton wrote during his first two years as Secretary of the Treasury. On 21 September 1789 the House of Representatives asked him for a plan to support the public credit.
Robert Y. Hayne's speech on Foot's resolution is the South Carolina side of the Webster-Hayne debate, the most celebrated exchange in the history of the United States Senate. In December 1829 Senator Samuel Foot of Connecticut proposed an inquiry into limiting the sale of public lands in the West.
The Social Security Act of 1935 created, among other programs, a national system of old-age benefits. Title VIII levied an excise on employers and an income tax on employees, both measured by wages and paid into the Treasury like other revenue.
To pay for the Civil War, Congress passed the Legal Tender Act of 25 February 1862, which authorized paper United States notes, soon called greenbacks, and declared them lawful money and a legal tender for all debts public and private. The notes were not redeemable in gold on demand, and they quickly traded below coin.
Humboldt's Gift is narrated by Charlie Citrine, a successful middle-aged Chicago writer who has won a Pulitzer Prize and made a fortune from a Broadway hit about the eighteenth-century adventurer Baron von Trenck, which was also made into a film. Now in his fifties, Charlie is distracted, spiritually restless and steadily losing his money.
Kidnapped is narrated by David Balfour, a seventeen-year-old Lowland Scot who in June 1751, after his father's death, leaves the village of Essendean with a letter for the House of Shaws. The minister Mr. Campbell sends him off with a shilling, a Bible and a handwritten recipe for lily-of-the-valley water, and with the news that he is a Balfour of Shaws.
In Hepburn v. Griswold (February 1870) a divided Court had held that the Legal Tender Act of 1862 could not make paper United States notes a legal tender for debts incurred before the act.
By the late 1960s Catholic parochial schools educated a large share of children in states such as Pennsylvania and Rhode Island, and rising lay-teacher salaries strained their budgets. Pennsylvania's Nonpublic Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1968 authorized the state to purchase secular educational services from private schools, reimbursing teachers' salaries, textbooks and materials for courses in mathematics, modern foreign languages, physical science and physical education, with state approval of materials and audited accounts.
Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania is a series of twelve public letters that John Dickinson printed in the Pennsylvania Chronicle beginning with the issue of November 30–December 3, 1767, and continuing weekly into February 1768. Writing as a modest farmer settled near the Delaware River, a man of small estate, a good library and a contented mind, Dickinson addressed his countrymen in the British colonies about the measures Parliament had passed in 1767 under Charles Townshend.
Letters from a Stoic selects from Seneca’s Moral Letters to Lucilius, a sequence of philosophical letters that turn daily life into training for freedom. Seneca writes as an older adviser to a younger friend, but the letters are also exercises for himself.
Cedric Errol is a curly-haired American boy of seven, living with his widowed mother in a modest side street of New York. He calls her Dearest, as his father did, and his best friends are Mr. Hobbs, the corner grocer who rails against earls as grasping tyrants, and Dick Tipton, a bootblack.
Little Women follows the four March sisters growing up in a New England town during and after the American Civil War, while their father serves as an army chaplain. Meg, the eldest, is pretty and longs for fine things; Jo, a tomboyish aspiring writer with a quick temper, is the heart of the book; Beth is shy, gentle and musical; and Amy, the youngest, is artistic and vain.
In 1895 New York passed the Bakeshop Act, which regulated the sanitation of bakeries and provided that no employee could be required or permitted to work in a bakery more than sixty hours a week or ten hours a day. The hours provision was carried into the state's Labor Law of 1897.
Christopher Lowe was president and principal shareholder of Lowe Management Corporation, a registered investment adviser from 1974 to 1981. During those years he was convicted of misappropriating a client's funds, acting as an adviser without registering in New York, tampering with evidence to cover up a fraud on a client, and stealing from a bank.
Congress chartered the Second Bank of the United States in 1816, five years after the charter of the first national bank, created in 1791 on Alexander Hamilton's plan, had lapsed. The new bank opened a branch in Baltimore.
Middlemarch, subtitled A Study of Provincial Life, follows several households in and around a Midlands market town from 1829 to 1832, the years leading to the first Reform Act. Its Prelude recalls Saint Teresa of Ávila and asks what becomes of women with a similar longing for a great life who are born into an age that gives it no outlet.
Mother Courage and Her Children follows Anna Fierling, a canteen woman nicknamed Mother Courage, who hauls her covered wagon behind the armies of the Thirty Years' War selling food, drink, boots and belts to soldiers. The play covers twelve years, from 1624 to 1636, in twelve scenes, each introduced by a written caption that tells the audience in advance what will happen.
Mr. Popper's Penguins is a comic novel in twenty short chapters about a house painter in the small town of Stillwater who dreams of the polar regions. Mr. Popper is a gentle, rather untidy man with a patient wife and two children, Bill and Janie.
After the Civil War, Chicago became the greatest grain market in the world. Wheat and corn from the prairie states arrived by rail and were lifted by steam-powered elevators into enormous warehouses before shipment east.
In March 2010 Congress passed and President Obama signed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Two provisions drew constitutional challenge.
Natural History: A Selection introduces one of antiquity’s great encyclopedic minds. Pliny wants to collect nature and human use together: stars, lands, peoples, animals, plants, metals, pigments, stones, medicines, marvels and technologies all belong to one vast inventory.
The National Labor Relations Act of 1935, often called the Wagner Act after Senator Robert F. Wagner of New York, guaranteed employees the right to organize and bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing, defined unfair labor practices by employers, and created a National Labor Relations Board to enforce it. Congress grounded the act in its power over interstate commerce, finding that refusals to bargain led to strikes that obstructed the flow of goods.
No Treason is a series of pamphlets that Lysander Spooner, a Boston lawyer and long-time abolitionist, published at his own expense after the Civil War. He planned a longer series but issued only three numbers, No. I and No. II in 1867 and No. VI, The Constitution of No Authority, in 1870; Nos.
For decades American bonds and mortgages had commonly promised payment in gold coin of the present standard of weight and fineness, a clause designed to protect lenders if the paper dollar lost value. In the banking crisis of 1933 the Roosevelt administration took the country off the gold standard: it required the surrender of gold coin, forbade its export, and, by a joint resolution of Congress on 5 June 1933, declared gold clauses against public policy and made every such obligation dischargeable dollar for dollar in any legal tender.
Northanger Abbey follows Catherine Morland, the unremarkable seventeen-year-old daughter of a country clergyman, whom the narrator teasingly insists no one would have supposed born to be a heroine. Catherine is a devoted reader of Gothic novels, especially Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho.
The Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant were written in a race against death. In the spring of 1884 the brokerage firm of Grant & Ward collapsed through his partner's fraud, leaving the former president living on borrowed money.
The Wilson Tariff Act of 28 August 1894, which became law without President Cleveland's signature, lowered tariff rates and imposed a two percent tax on incomes above $4,000 a year, including rents, interest, dividends and business profits, for the years 1895 through 1899. Charles Pollock, a shareholder of the Farmers' Loan and Trust Company of New York, sued to stop the company from paying the tax, a form of suit that allowed the question to reach the courts before collection.
Pride and Prejudice turns courtship into a discipline of moral interpretation. Elizabeth Bennet first judges Fitzwilliam Darcy by his proud refusal to dance and by Wickham's persuasive account of injury, while Darcy judges Elizabeth through the embarrassment of her family, the inferiority of her connections, and his own rank.
Religion and the Rise of Capitalism is a historical study, first given as the Henry Scott Holland Memorial Lectures in 1922, of how Christian thought about economic life changed between the late Middle Ages and the early eighteenth century. Tawney's question is how a society that once judged trade, lending and prices by moral and religious standards came to treat economic activity as a self-governing realm ruled by impersonal laws.
Rerum Novarum, issued by Pope Leo XIII on 15 May 1891 and addressed to the bishops of the Catholic world, takes its Latin title from its opening words about the spirit of revolutionary change. Its English title is On the Condition of the Working Classes.
The Farmers Cooperative of Arkansas and Oklahoma, an agricultural cooperative with about 23,000 members, raised money for its general operations by selling promissory notes payable on demand. The notes were uncollateralized and uninsured but paid a variable interest rate set monthly to stay above what local banks paid.
Texas financed its public schools through a Minimum Foundation Program that combined state money with a required local share, and allowed each district to raise more by taxing property within its borders. Because property values differed widely, so did spending.
Capital Gains Research Bureau, Inc., and its principal, Harry P. Schwarzmann, published a monthly investment newsletter, the Capital Gains Report, mailed to about five thousand subscribers at eighteen dollars a year. Between March and November 1960, on six occasions, the firm bought shares of a stock shortly before recommending it in the Report for long-term investment.
Charles Edwards was chairman, chief executive and sole shareholder of ETS Payphones, Inc. Through independent distributors ETS sold payphones to the public for about $7,000 each, packaged with a site lease, a five-year leaseback and management agreement, and a promise to buy the phone back at full price at the end of the lease or within 180 days of a request.
The W. J. Howey Company owned large citrus groves in Lake County, Florida, near a resort hotel it also operated. Each year it planted about five hundred acres, kept half and sold the rest to the public in narrow strips, explaining that the sales helped finance further planting.
The Second Treatise, subtitled 'An Essay Concerning the True Original, Extent, and End of Civil Government', is the constructive half of Locke's Two Treatises. The First Treatise demolishes Sir Robert Filmer's Patriarcha, which derived the absolute power of kings from Adam's fatherly dominion.
Maupassant's stories, written mostly between 1880 and 1890, are compact, ironic and often brutal studies of French life: Norman peasants, Parisian clerks, prostitutes, bourgeois families, soldiers and the provincial gentry. This selection gathers many of the best known, which typically include the following.
Sense and Sensibility follows two sisters whose temperaments represent the opposed values of its title. When Henry Dashwood dies, Norland Park in Sussex passes to John, his son by a first marriage, who promises to provide for his stepmother and half-sisters but is talked out of any real generosity by his grasping wife Fanny.
From 1980 to 1982 Eugene and Julia McMahon, for themselves and as trustees of pension and profit-sharing plans, held accounts with the brokerage firm Shearson/American Express Inc. Julia McMahon signed two customer agreements providing that any controversy over the accounts would be settled by arbitration.
Silas Marner is George Eliot's short novel of a lonely linen-weaver restored to human fellowship by a child. In his youth Silas belonged to a strict dissenting congregation at Lantern Yard in a northern manufacturing town, where he was respected for his piety and for the cataleptic fits the brethren took for spiritual visitations.
In March 1869 the Louisiana legislature passed an act entitled "An act to protect the health of the city of New Orleans," which chartered the Crescent City Live-Stock Landing and Slaughter-House Company and gave it for twenty-five years the sole right to maintain stock landings and slaughterhouses in the parishes of Orleans, Jefferson and St. Bernard. Every butcher in that district of over a thousand square miles had to bring his animals to the company's slaughterhouse below the city and pay its fees.
In 1870 John D. Rockefeller, his brother William, Henry M. Flagler and others organized the Standard Oil Company of Ohio to refine crude oil. Over the next decade the company acquired or allied itself with most of its competitors, and in 1882 the stockholders of some forty companies placed their shares with nine trustees, creating the Standard Oil Trust.
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes collects the first twelve short stories about the consulting detective of 221B Baker Street, each narrated by his friend Dr. John Watson. In A Scandal in Bohemia the King of Bohemia hires Holmes to recover a compromising photograph from the singer Irene Adler; Holmes, disguised first as a groom and then as a clergyman, tricks her into revealing its hiding place, but she sees through him and escapes with her new husband, leaving Holmes the admiring loser.
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is a comic and nostalgic novel of boyhood set in the 1840s in St. Petersburg, a small Missouri town on the Mississippi modelled on Twain's Hannibal. Tom is an orphan living with his kind, anxious Aunt Polly, his priggish half-brother Sid and his cousin Mary.
The Arabian Nights Entertainments is Andrew Lang's 1898 selection of the Thousand and One Nights for children, retold in English from Antoine Galland's early eighteenth-century French version. The frame story comes first.
The Arthashastra, the 'science of material gain' or of statecraft, is a vast Sanskrit treatise on how a king should acquire, protect and govern territory. Written mostly in prose with occasional verses, it is divided into fifteen books and some 150 chapters, and covers almost every aspect of administration with remarkable detail and an unsentimental realism that has led to comparisons with Machiavelli.
The Athenian Constitution (Athenaion Politeia) is a short treatise in two parts on the government of Athens, written in the 330s or 320s BC by Aristotle or by a member of his school as one of the 158 constitutions the Lyceum is said to have collected. It was known only from quotations until a papyrus roll, copied on the back of farm accounts from Roman Egypt, was acquired by the British Museum and identified by Frederic G. Kenyon, who published the text and his translation in 1891.
The Book of Enoch, usually called 1 Enoch, is a collection of five Jewish apocalyptic books gathered under the name of Enoch, the patriarch of Genesis 5 who walked with God and was not, for God took him. Written in stages during the Second Temple period, it presents Enoch as a righteous scribe who is shown the secrets of heaven, earth and the coming judgment and writes them down for his son Methuselah and for a remote generation.
The Call of the Wild follows Buck, a huge St. Bernard and Scotch shepherd cross, through one terrible and transforming year of the Klondike gold rush. Buck lives as the lord of Judge Miller's estate in the Santa Clara Valley of California until Manuel, a gardener's helper who needs money for his lottery gambling, sells him to dog traders.
The Commonwealth of Oceana, published in London in 1656 during Oliver Cromwell's Protectorate, is a model constitution for a republic set in an island called Oceana, which is England under a thin disguise. Scotland is Marpesia, Ireland Panopea, London Emporium, and Cromwell himself appears as Olphaus Megaletor, the Lord Archon or sole legislator who founds the commonwealth and then gives up his power.
The Communist Manifesto presents modern history as the history of class struggle and casts the bourgeoisie as both revolutionary and exploitative. Marx and Engels argue that capitalism has dissolved feudal relations, expanded world markets, concentrated production, remade family and nation, and subjected older loyalties to cash exchange.
The Count of Monte Cristo is a vast novel of injustice and revenge. In 1815 Edmond Dantès, a young sailor of Marseilles, returns from a voyage on which he carried a letter from Napoleon's island of Elba as a dying captain requested.
The Cricket in Times Square is set at a newsstand in the Times Square subway station in New York City at the end of one summer. The stand belongs to the Bellini family: Papa, Mama, and their son Mario, who keeps it open late in the hope of selling a few more papers, because business is poor.
Peter Heather's book is a narrative and argument about how the western half of the Roman Empire came to an end in the fifth century. It is organized in three parts, Pax Romana, Crisis and Fall.
The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, published by Macmillan in London in February 1936, is John Maynard Keynes's attempt to explain why an economy can remain for long periods with many people out of work. Written during the Great Depression, it argues that the classical economics Keynes had been taught describes only a special case, one of full employment, and that a more general theory is needed for the world as it is.
The Great Gatsby is narrated by Nick Carraway, a young Midwesterner and war veteran who comes East in the spring of 1922 to learn the bond business and rents a small house in West Egg, on Long Island, beside the vast mansion of the mysterious Jay Gatsby. Across the bay in fashionable East Egg live Nick's cousin Daisy Buchanan and her husband Tom, a rich former Yale football player, along with Daisy's friend Jordan Baker, a champion golfer.
The Hobbit, or There and Back Again tells how Bilbo Baggins, a comfortable, respectable hobbit of Bag-End under the Hill, is drawn into an adventure he never wanted. The wizard Gandalf marks his door, and thirteen dwarves led by Thorin Oakenshield arrive for an unexpected party.
The Idiot tells what happens when a man of complete goodness and simplicity enters the money-driven society of St. Petersburg in the late 1860s. Prince Lev Nikolayevich Myshkin, the last of an old noble family, returns to Russia after four years in a Swiss sanatorium, where Dr. Schneider treated him for the epileptic illness that left him so slow as a child that people called him an idiot.
The Inheritance of Rome is Chris Wickham's history of Europe and the Mediterranean from the last century of the western Roman empire to the year 1000. First published in 2009 in Britain and the United States (the American edition carried the subtitle Illuminating the Dark Ages, 400–1000), it runs to about 650 pages and is written for general readers by one of the leading specialists in the period.
The Institutes of Justinian is a short official textbook of Roman law, issued at Constantinople on 21 November 533 and given the force of law, together with the Digest, from 30 December of that year. It was written for first-year law students: the preface, addressed to the youth desirous of studying the law, explains that the emperor, having reconquered Africa and set in order both the imperial constitutions and the writings of the old jurists, has commissioned Tribonian, Theophilus and Dorotheus to compose an elementary book so that beginners may learn the law as it is actually in force.
The Journal of John Woolman is the spiritual autobiography of a New Jersey Quaker tailor and minister, begun in his thirty-sixth year and continued until a few days before his death. He opens in Northampton, Burlington County, where as a child he reads the twenty-second chapter of Revelation by the roadside and, soon after, kills a mother robin with a stone and then her nestlings, an act whose horror teaches him that God has placed in every mind a principle of goodness toward all creatures.
The Law (La Loi) is a pamphlet of about sixteen thousand words that Frédéric Bastiat published in Paris in 1850, during the Second Republic, when he sat in the Legislative Assembly and was dying of a disease of the throat and lungs. It is his most direct statement of the purpose and limits of law.
The Merchant of Venice joins two stories, a bond for a pound of flesh and a lottery of caskets, and moves between the commercial city of Venice and Belmont, the country estate of the heiress Portia. Antonio, a wealthy merchant, opens the play sad without knowing why.
The Metamorphosis is a novella in three parts about Gregor Samsa, a travelling salesman in cloth who supports his parents and his seventeen-year-old sister Grete, and who wakes one morning in his room to find that he has been changed into a monstrous insect. Kafka tells the story plainly, in the third person and almost entirely from Gregor's point of view, never explaining the transformation and never letting it become a dream.
The Moffats follows a year in the life of a family with little money and a great deal of fun in the small Connecticut town of Cranbury, around the time of the First World War. Mama, a widow, earns their living as a dressmaker in the rented yellow house on New Dollar Street, where she lives with her four children: Sylvie, the eldest, gentle and grown-up; Joey, the steady older brother who does the heavy chores; Jane, the imaginative middle girl through whose eyes much of the book is seen; and Rufus, five and a half and always in the middle of something.
The Muqaddimah (Introduction) is the opening part of Ibn Khaldun's universal history, the Kitab al-Ibar, and has long been read on its own as a treatise on the nature of human society and the method of history. Ibn Khaldun wrote it in 1377 during a retreat from court life at the castle of Qal'at Ibn Salama, in the hills of what is now western Algeria, and kept revising it for the rest of his life in Cairo.
The Murder on the Links is Agatha Christie's second Hercule Poirot novel, narrated like the first by Captain Arthur Hastings. Returning from Paris on the Calais boat-train, Hastings meets a pert young actress with black curls who calls herself Cinderella.
Captain Arthur Hastings, invalided home from the Western Front in 1916, meets his old friend John Cavendish and is invited to Styles Court, the Cavendish family's country house in Essex. The house belongs for her lifetime to John's stepmother, the generous and domineering Emily Inglethorp, who has recently married Alfred Inglethorp, a bearded man about twenty years younger whom the family suspect of wanting her money.
The Pearl is a short novella in six chapters, framed as a folk tale retold in the Gulf town of La Paz, on the coast of Baja California. Kino, a poor pearl diver, lives in a brush house by the shore with his wife, Juana, and their infant son, Coyotito.
The Portrait of a Lady follows Isabel Archer, a young American woman brought to Europe by her aunt, Mrs. Touchett, and admired for her intelligence, independence and hunger for experience. At Gardencourt, the English estate of her uncle, Isabel meets her invalid cousin Ralph Touchett, who loves her imaginatively and persuades his dying father to leave her a fortune so that she can live freely.
The Princess and Curdie is George MacDonald's sequel to The Princess and the Goblin, set about a year after the goblins were defeated. Curdie, the miner's son, now nearly thirteen, has grown dull and doubtful; he half believes that Princess Irene's great-great-grandmother was only a child's dream.
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism is a long essay in two parts asking why modern rational capitalism, with its disciplined, systematic pursuit of profit as a duty, arose first and most strongly in the Protestant lands of the West. Weber does not argue that Protestantism caused capitalism, and he says so explicitly; he argues that certain forms of Protestant belief helped produce an ethos, a moral attitude toward work and wealth, that fitted the needs of a new economic order.
The Railway Children tells how Roberta (Bobbie), Peter and Phyllis lose their comfortable London life and find friends, work and courage beside a country railway line. One evening, just after Peter's birthday, two men call, Father goes away with them, and Mother will say only that he has gone on business and that the children must not ask.
The Road to Serfdom is a short book by the Austrian-born economist F. A. Hayek, written in London during the Second World War and published by Routledge in March 1944 and by the University of Chicago Press that September. Hayek dedicated it to the socialists of all parties.
The Satires of Horace and Persius brings together two Roman satiric voices separated by style, temperament and political world. Horace's Sermones, written after the civil wars and during the rise of Augustus, are conversational poems about greed, ambition, social climbing, sexual folly, legacy-hunting, literary quarrels, dinner parties and the art of living within limits.
The Secret History, in Greek the Anekdota or unpublished things, is a short work in thirty chapters in which Procopius sets out to tell what he says he could not safely write in his Wars while its subjects were alive: the hidden causes of events and the private conduct of the emperor Justinian, the empress Theodora, the general Belisarius and his wife Antonina. It is usually dated to about 550, though some scholars place it later in the 550s, and it was not circulated in Procopius's lifetime.
Montesquieu's The Spirit of the Laws (De l'esprit des lois), published anonymously at Geneva in 1748 after many years of reading and travel, asks why the laws of different peoples differ and what makes them fit or unfit for those who live under them. His answer is that laws are relations: they must suit the form of government and also the climate and soil, the religion, commerce, manners and size of a nation.
The Story of the Volsungs is a thirteenth-century Icelandic prose saga that tells, from beginning to end, the legend of the Volsung kindred, the dragon-slayer Sigurd and the fall of the Niflungs. The library text is the translation by Eiríkr Magnússon and William Morris, first published in 1870, in the 1888 edition, with an introduction, the translators' preface, notes, and an appendix of Morris and Magnússon's versions of related Eddic lays, from the Second Lay of Helgi Hundings-bane to the Lament of Oddrun.
The Taming of the Shrew is a play within a play. In the Induction, the drunken tinker Christopher Sly is thrown out of an alehouse and falls asleep on the heath.
The Theory of the Leisure Class, published by Macmillan in New York in 1899, is Thorstein Veblen's study of how wealth, status and consumption shape economic life and taste. Written while he taught at the University of Chicago, during the Gilded Age of American fortunes, it treats the habits of the rich not as personal vices but as institutions with a long evolutionary history, and it describes them in a dry, ironic scientific vocabulary that made the book famous.
The book, known in Italy as Il Milione and in early French manuscripts as the Devisement du Monde (Description of the World), is less a diary than a geography of Asia as the Polos knew it, organized by route and region and told in the voice of Rustichello, who often addresses the reader directly. The Prologue tells how the Venetian brothers Niccolò and Maffeo Polo, trading in the Crimea and on the Volga in the 1260s, were carried by war farther and farther east until envoys brought them to Kublai, the Great Kaan of the Tartars, who questioned them about the Pope and the Christian faith and sent them back to Rome asking for a hundred learned Christians and oil from the lamp of the Holy Sepulchre.
On a camping trip in the Canadian woods, eleven-year-old Sam Beaver, a Montana rancher's son who loves wild things and keeps a journal that ends each night with a question, discovers a pair of trumpeter swans nesting on a hidden pond. He keeps their secret, and when a fox creeps up on the sitting pen he drives it off with a stick.
The Warden is a quiet institutional novel about conscience, reform and the human cost of public righteousness. Septimus Harding is the gentle precentor of Barchester Cathedral and warden of Hiram's Hospital, a charitable almshouse for twelve elderly men.
Adam Smith's An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, published in London by Strahan and Cadell on 9 March 1776, asks what makes a nation rich and what policies help or hinder that growth. Smith's answer is that wealth is not a store of gold and silver but the annual produce of a nation's labour, and that it grows chiefly through the division of labour, the accumulation of capital and the freedom to trade.
Walter Hartright, a young London drawing-master, is engaged through his Italian friend Professor Pesca to teach watercolour at Limmeridge House in Cumberland. Walking home across Hampstead Heath late on the night before he leaves, he is touched on the shoulder by a woman dressed entirely in white who asks the way to London and speaks fondly of Limmeridge; soon after, two men in a chaise ask a policeman whether he has seen a woman escaped from an asylum.
Amory Blaine, the only son of the wealthy, eccentric Beatrice Blaine and her ineffectual husband Stephen, is raised in luxury, travels with his mother, and grows up handsome, clever and sure of his own superiority. After two years in Minneapolis and a spell at a New England boarding school, where he is unpopular and then a football hero, he goes to Princeton, drawn by its glamour.
Mortgage Trust of America was a real estate investment trust advised by Transamerica Mortgage Advisors, Inc., known as TAMA, a subsidiary of the Transamerica Corporation. A shareholder of the trust sued in federal court, both derivatively on the trust's behalf and for a class of shareholders, naming the trust, several trustees, TAMA, Transamerica and another affiliate, Land Capital, Inc.
Treasure Island is narrated mainly by Jim Hawkins, the son of an innkeeper whose ordinary life is transformed when the old pirate Billy Bones comes to the Admiral Benbow inn. Bones brings a sea chest, a map and danger in the form of former shipmates, including Black Dog and the blind beggar Pew.
In February 1969 National Industries, Inc. bought 34 percent of the voting stock of TSC Industries, Inc.
James Herman O'Hagan was a partner in the Minneapolis law firm Dorsey & Whitney. In July 1988 the London company Grand Metropolitan PLC retained the firm as local counsel for a possible tender offer for the Pillsbury Company.
Utopia is a dialogue in two books, written in Latin and presented as a true report. In Book I More, writing in his own person, recalls his embassy to Flanders in 1515 with Cuthbert Tunstall.
Before the Civil War the paper money of the United States consisted chiefly of notes issued by hundreds of state-chartered banks, of uneven credit and value. During the war Congress created a national currency: United States notes issued by the Treasury, and notes of new national banks chartered under the National Bank Acts of 1863 and 1864.
Walden; or, Life in the Woods is Henry David Thoreau's account of the two years and two months, from July 4, 1845, to September 1847, that he spent living alone in a one-room house he built himself beside Walden Pond, about a mile and a half south of the village of Concord, Massachusetts. He compresses the experiment into the cycle of a single year, moving from summer through winter to the thaw of spring, in eighteen chapters.
Washington Square is a compact novel about an heiress, a suitor and a father whose intelligence becomes a weapon. Catherine Sloper is the plain, shy and dutiful daughter of Dr. Austin Sloper, a wealthy New York physician still grieving his brilliant dead wife and disappointed that Catherine lacks her mother's beauty and charm.
Washington State's 1913 Minimum Wages for Women act declared that inadequate wages and unsanitary conditions harmed the health and morals of women and minors, and it created an Industrial Welfare Commission to fix wages sufficient for their decent maintenance. Elsie Parrish worked as a chambermaid at the Cascadian Hotel in Wenatchee, owned by the West Coast Hotel Company.
Hugh Kennedy's When Baghdad Ruled the Muslim World is a narrative history of the Abbasid caliphate at the height of its power, from the revolution that brought the dynasty to the throne in 750 to the anarchy of the later ninth century at Samarra, after which effective power slipped away from the caliphs. It was first published in Britain in 2004 as The Court of the Caliphs and in the United States in 2005 under its present title.
Wickard v. Filburn, 317 U.S. 111, decided on 9 November 1942, tested how far the commerce power of Congress could reach into the fields of a single farm.
Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands is the lively autobiography of a Jamaican doctress, nurse and businesswoman. Mary Seacole begins in Kingston, where she was born to a Scottish soldier and a Creole mother who kept a boarding house and was famous for her cures; she declines to give the year, saying only that she and the century were young together.
Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v.
In 1995 a federal court placed the Cleveland City School District, which enrolled more than 75,000 mostly low-income children, under state control after findings of a crisis of magnitude; the district had met none of eighteen state performance standards. Ohio responded with several programs, including community (charter) schools, magnet schools and a Pilot Project Scholarship Program.