Edith Wharton`s dark view of society, the somber economics of marriage, and the powerlessness of the unwedded woman at the turn of the twentieth century emerge dramatically in the tragic novel The House of Mirth

The world`s first great narrative history, Herodotus`s The Histories vividly describes how the Greeks - few in number, poor, and disunited - managed to repulse a massive invasion by the powerful Persian army in the 5th century B.C.

A monumental work unsurpassed for its brilliant description, accuracy, and penetrating insights, Thucydide`s History of the Peloponnesian War is a spectacular eyewitness report of the war between Greece`s two most powerful city-states, Athens and Sparta, as it unfolded during the fifth century B.C.E

Epigrammatic, enigmatic, intensely poetic, the Tao Te Ching is the mystical, spiritual soul of Taoism, one of the three great religions of ancient China. The Tao is usually translated as "the way" or "the path", but it is better understood as a universal life force that flows around and through all things

Born a slave, Frederick Douglass educated himself, escaped, and became on of the greatest social leaders in American History. Although usually identified with the monumental Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Douglass produced two additional autobiograthies, the second of which he called My Bondage and my Freedom

A classic of American political thought, The Federalist is a series of eighty-five essays by three authors - Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay - written to curry support for the proposed new Constitution of the United States, a document that many considered too redical

One of the most influential books ever published in America, W.E.B. Du Bois`s The Souls of Black Folk is an eloquent collection of fourteen essays that discribe the life, the ambitions, the struggles, and the passions of African Americans at the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century

Set in the 1740s just as the French and Indian wars have begun, the novel opens as Natty Bumppo - known as Deerslayer - and his friend Hurry Harry travel to Tom Hutter`s house in upstate New York. Hurry plans to marry Tom`s beautiful daughter Judith, while Deerslayer has come to help his close friend Chingachgook save his bride-to-be, Wah-ta-Wah, from the Huron Indians. When war breaks out, and Hurry and Tom are captured by Indians, Deerslayer must go on his first warpath to rescue them

Considered the most important poem of the twentieth century, T.S. Eliot`s The Waste Land is an oblique and fascinating view of the hopelessness and confusion of purpose in modern Western civilization