Books

I stumbled upon an online archive today with digitized historic documents and books that ended up costing me about two hours of my time just browsing.

I have just seen that the British Library in London has reached a deal with Google to digitize roughly 250,000 books, newspapers, articles, etc from between 1700 and 1870.

As most of my readers probably know, I am a huge fan of Mark Twain. The name of this blog comes from a quote he made about history and a lot of my inspiration comes from his works. The recent news of a Montgomery, Alabama-based publisher publishing a censored version of one of Twain’s most famous books, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is really rather sickening to me.

I have a new featured book for you this week. This one is an American classic called Roughing It by Mark Twain. It is one of Mark Twain’s travel books which made him famous as an author. In this book he writes about his travels throughout the Old American West, his adventures with mining, newspaper … more »

According to The Times, the British Library is currently undertaking a project to digitize their collection of more than 65,000 nineteenth century books in an effort to preserve them and make them available for free for public consumption. The only catch is that you must own an Amazon Kindle which is something I find incredibly … more »

This week I have a new featured book called Europe in the High Middle Ages by William Chester Jordan. It is a very well-written book which details the Europe in the eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. It covers a range of topics from the Mediterranean to Scandinavia, the Crusades to monasteries, the Catholic Church … more »

I’ve just begun reading a new and so far very interesting book about European conquest, colonization and cultural change in the late medieval/early middle ages period. I will be spending a significant amount of time over my break pouring through this book as it is quite interesting. It starts off talking about the expansion of … more »

I realized today that I haven’t changed the featured book for quite a long time. So, I’ve changed it to another book about Native Americans called The Earth Shall Weep: A History of Native America by James Wilson. It is a fascinating history of the Native Americans that gives each region of the United States … more »

So now that I have access again to my entire personal library, I have begun to catalog all of my books with LibraryThing. It is taking a while because I have quite a large number of books. Several of them are foreign which means that it is quite difficult to find them with LibraryThing. I … more »

Today I ordered a new book that looked really interesting. The book is called It Happened in Colorado by James A. Crutchfield. I am originally from Colorado and so I figured a book on the history of Colorado would be an interesting read. James A. Crutchfield always writes interesting books about the history of the … more »