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

This book presents fresh empirical evidence on the effectiveness of various public-private education partnerships from around the world, including voucher programs and faith-based schools

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

In the Poetics Aristotle focuses mainly on drama, especially tragedy, and introduces ideas that are still debated today - more than two thousand years later

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