Monday, January 30, 2012

Childhood in India, A Narrative for Young Children/Other

Based on a true stories, Childhood in India, A Narrative for Young Children, published in 1870. From the University of Florida Library of digitized books. Click here.

Textbook of Art Education Second Year/Project Gutenberg


When the trees are bare of leaves, we see how beautiful the branches are.

No two trees stretch out their arms in just the same way. But the largest boughs always spring from the big round trunk.

See how the smaller boughs spring from larger ones and rock the winter buds in the air.

Paint a tree as it looks in November.


Click here.

Wednesday, January 18, 2012

Madame Roland, Makers of History by John S. C. Abbott /Project Gutenberg

Just over 300 pages, story of the French Revolution's Reign of Terror from Madame Roland's memoirs.

"The history of Madame Roland embraces the most interesting events of the French Revolution, that most instructive tragedy which time has yet enacted. There is, perhaps, contained in the memoirs of no other woman so much to invigorate the mind with the desire for high intellectual culture, and so much to animate the spirit heroically to meet all the ills of this eventful life. Notwithstanding her experience of the heaviest temporal calamities, she found, in the opulence of her own intellectual treasures, an unfailing resource. These inward joys peopled her solitude with society, and dispelled even from the dungeon its gloom. I know not where to look for a career more full of suggestive thought."

Click here.

Here and Now Story Book Two to Seven Year Olds by Lucy Sprague Mitchel/Project Gutenberg

Click here. Published in 1921.

The Old-Fashioned Fairy Book by Constance Cary Harrison /Project Gutenberg

Click here.

Tuesday, January 10, 2012

Ancient Man/Project Gutenberg

Click here.

ANCIENT MAN
THE BEGINNING
OF CIVILIZATIONS
BY HENDRIK WILLEM VAN LOON


1922.

DEDICATION To HANSJE AND WILLEM.

My darling boys,

You are twelve and eight years old. Soon you will be grown up. You will leave home and begin your own lives. I have been thinking about that day, wondering what I could do to help you. At last, I have had an idea. The best compass is a thorough understanding of the growth and the experience of the human race. Why should I not write a special history for you?

So I took my faithful Corona and five bottles of ink and a box of matches and a bale of paper and began to work upon the first volume. If all goes well there will be eight more and they will tell you what you ought to know of the last six thousand years.

But before you start to read let me explain what I intend to do.

I am not going to present you with a textbook. Neither will it be a volume of pictures. It will not even be a regular history in the accepted sense of the word.

I shall just take both of you by the hand and together we shall wander forth to explore the intricate wilderness of the bygone ages.

I shall show you mysterious rivers which seem to come from nowhere and which are doomed to reach no ultimate destination.

I shall bring you close to dangerous abysses, hidden carefully beneath a thick overgrowth of pleasant but deceiving romance.

Here and there we shall leave the beaten track to scale a solitary and lonely peak, towering high above the surrounding country.

Unless we are very lucky we shall sometimes lose ourselves in a sudden and dense fog of ignorance.

Wherever we go we must carry our warm cloak of human sympathy and understanding for vast tracts of land will prove to be a sterile desert--swept by icy storms of popular prejudice and personal greed and unless we come well prepared we shall forsake our faith in humanity and that, dear boys, would be the worst thing that could happen to any of us.

I shall not pretend to be an infallible guide. Whenever you have a chance, take counsel with other travelers who have passed along the same route before. Compare their observations with mine and if this leads you to different conclusions, I shall certainly not be angry with you.

I have never preached to you in times gone by.

I am not going to preach to you today.

You know what the world expects of you--that you shall do your share of the common task and shall do it bravely and cheerfully.

If these books can help you, so much the better.

And with all my love I dedicate these histories to you and to the boys and girls who shall keep you company on the voyage through life.

HENDRIK WILLEM VAN LOON.

Friday, January 6, 2012

Scottish Fairy Book/Project Gutenberg


"In preparing this book I have tried to make a representative collection from these different classes of Scottish Folklore, taking, when possible, the stories which are least well known, in the hope that some of them, at least, may be new to the children of this generation.

It may interest some of these children to know that when James IV was a little boy, nearly four hundred years ago, he used to sit on his tutor, Sir David Lindsay's, knee, and listen to some of the same stories that are written here:—to the story of Thomas the Rhymer, of the Red-Etin, and of The Black Bull of Norroway." ~ Elizabeth W. Grierson. Whitchesters, Hawick, N.B.,12th April, 1910.

See here

Wednesday, January 4, 2012

Through a Microscope /Project Gutenberg

Through a Microscope by Frederick Leroy Sargent, Mary Treat, and Samuel R. Wells, 1886

SOMETHING OF THE SCIENCE
TOGETHER WITH MANY CURIOUS OBSERVATIONS
INDOOR AND OUT
AND DIRECTIONS FOR A HOME-MADE MICROSCOPE

See here.