Free History Books to Download in July 2024

The harrowing true story that inspired the critically acclaimed film

The son of a freed slave, Solomon Northup lived the first thirty years of his life as a free man in upstate New York. In the spring of 1841, he was offered a job: a short-term, lucrative engagement as a violinist in a traveling circus. It was a trap. In Washington, DC, Northup was drugged, kidnapped, and sold into slavery. He spent the next twelve years on plantations in Louisiana, enduring backbreaking labor, unimaginable violence, and inhumane treatment at the hands of cruel masters, until a kind stranger helped to win his release. His account of those years is a shocking, unforgettable portrait of America’s most insidious historical institution as told by a man who experienced it firsthand.

Published shortly after Harriet Beecher Stowe’s abolitionist classic Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Northup’s memoir became a bestseller in 1853. With its eloquent depiction of life before and after bondage, Twelve Years a Slave was a unique and effective entry into the national debate over slavery. Rediscovered in the 1960s and now the inspiration for a major motion picture, Northup’s poignant narrative gives readers an invaluable glimpse into a shameful chapter of American history. 

An American masterwork in praise of nature, self-reliance, and the simple life

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

In 1845, the transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau moved from his home in the town of Concord, Massachusetts, to a small cabin he built by hand on the shores of Walden Pond. He spent the next two years alone in the woods, learning to live self-sufficiently and to take his creative and moral inspiration from nature. Part memoir, part philosophical treatise, part environmental manifesto, Walden is Thoreau’s inspirational account of those extraordinary years and one of the most influential books ever written.

Henry Ford’s classic treatise on life and business

Written by the legendary inventor and industrialist who pioneered the American automotive industry, My Life and Work is a unique combination of memoir and business treatise. In straightforward and inviting prose, Henry Ford describes his early life as a mechanically inclined farmer’s son, the inner workings of his famed motor company, and the development of the Model T. He provides analysis and commentary on some of his key business decisions, including his resolution to compensate workers well beyond the prevailing wage and his commitment to building a diverse workforce composed of “about the same proportions as a cross-section of a society in general.”

My Life and Work is an enduring American classic that captures the musings and philosophical considerations of one of the country’s greatest visionaries.