Merkaba Press imprint: 261 books

Towards the close of the First French Revolution, Joseph Leopold Sigisbert Hugo, son of a joiner at Nancy, and an officer risen from the ranks in the Republican army, married Sophie Trébuchet, daughter of a Nantes fitter-out of privateers, a Vendean royalist and devotee. Victor Marie Hugo,...

Adam Smith was born at Kirkcaldy, in the county of Fife, Scotland, on the 5th of June 1723. He was the son of Adam Smith, Writer to the Signet, Judge Advocate for Scotland and Comptroller of the Customs in the Kirkcaldy district, by Margaret, daughter of John Douglas of Strathendry, a considerable...

"With the great, one's thoughts and manners easily become great; ... what this country longs for is personalities, grand persons, to counteract its materialities," says Emerson. Such lives as are sketched in this book are a constant inspiration, both to young and old. They teach Garfield's...

IN our efforts to realise the leading events of our own history we experience no small difficulty from the fact that so much of the face of England has completely altered its outward appearance under the stress of modern development, so that we find it particularly hard to picture to ourselves their...

A Small Boy and Others is a book of autobiography by Henry James published in 1913. The book covers James' earliest years and discusses his intellectually active family, his intermittent schooling, and his first trips to Europe.

A perfect crystal is rare; so the perfectly normal man is an exception; yet for all that he is a better representative of the ideal of his type than the average. Nietzsche was most assuredly very ingenious; he was unusually talented but he was not a genius in the full sense of the word. He...

We shall be able to follow the story of Daniel Boone with a better understanding if, before entering upon it, we take a brief survey of the country in which his entire life was passed and the people among whom he lived—the American backwoods and the American backwoodsmen. At the outbreak...

One pleasant summer morning Alphonzo was amusing himself by swinging on a gate in front of his mother’s house. His cousin Malleville, who was then about eight years old, was sitting upon a stone outside of the gate, by the roadside, in a sort of corner that was formed between the wall and a great...

THE story of Cleopatra is a story of crime. It is a narrative of the course and the consequences of unlawful love. In her strange and romantic history we see this passion portrayed with the most complete and graphic fidelity in all its influences and effects; its uncontrollable impulses, its intoxicating...

THE history of western Europe in the seventeenth century is a history of wars.   "Wars destroy the morals of mankind by habituating them to refer everything to force, and by necessitating them so often to dispense with the ordinary suggestions of sympathy and justice." This...

Before the murderers of Domitian raised their hands to strike the fatal blow, they looked around, we read, to find a successor to replace him. Others whom they sounded on the subject shrunk away in fear or in suspicion, till they thought of M. Cocceius Nerva, who was likely to fill worthily the office...

The Republic is a dialogue on Roman politics by Cicero, written in six books between 54 and 51 BC. It is written in the format of a Socratic dialogue in which Scipio Aemilianus (who had died a few decades before Cicero was born, several centuries after Socrates' death) takes the role of a wise old...

If the extraordinary individual, who styled himself not unjustly the scourge of God and terror of the world, had never existed, the history of the Huns would have been very little more interesting to us at the present epoch, than that of the Gepidae, or Alans, or any of the chief nations that were...

In this essay I do not aspire to recount the narrative of the empire, or to instruct trained historians. Nor do I propose to trace the history of the imperial idea, which Mr. Bryce has exhibited in a work which it would be impertinence in me to commend. My object is to examine the working of the imperial...