Free History Books to Download in December 2024

The nineteenth-century author of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow presents a vivid history of the Granada War, which ended Islamic rule in Spain.

From 1482 to 1492, Catholic monarchs Isabella I of Castile and Ferdinand II of Aragon mounted a series of military campaigns against the Nasrid kingdom of Granada.

Washington Irving’s acclaimed Chronicles of the Conquest of Granada describes the struggles and numerous battles of the ten-year conflict, which culminated with the annexation of Granada by Castile. Irving frames the text as a recovered contemporary manuscript written by the fictional Jesuit priest Fray Antonio Agapida, lending a sense of immediacy to his narrative.

The classic memoir of the Sioux Nation by the early–twentieth century Indian rights activist and son of a Lakota chief.

When it was originally published in 1928, Luther Standing Bear’s autobiographical account of his tribe and tribesmen was hailed by Van Wyck Brooks as “one of the most engaging and veracious we have ever had.” It remains a landmark in Native American literature, among the first books about Native Americans written by a Native American.

Born in the 1860s, the son of a Lakota chief, Standing Bear was in the first class at Carlisle Indian School, witnessed the Ghost Dance uprising from the Pine Ridge Reservation, toured Europe with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show, and devoted his later years to the Native American rights movement of the 1920s and 1930s.

An analysis that grounds the law in the personality, liberty, and property of the individual from “the most brilliant economic journalist who ever lived” (Joseph Schumpeter, twentieth-century political economist).

The law is the organization of the natural right of lawful defense; it is the substitution of collective for individual forces, for the purpose of acting in the sphere in which they have a right to act, of doing what they have a right to do, to secure persons, liberties, and properties, and to maintain each in its right, so as to cause justice to reign over all.

It is with these words that the nineteenth-century French economist and statesman Frédéric Bastiat describes his theory of the individual rights of man in a classic refutation of the communist ideas that were sweeping across France at the time. In these pages, Bastiat affirms that the non-intervention of the State in private affairs gives rise to our wants and their satisfactions developing in their natural order. Problems arise when the law leaves its proper sphere and is employed in annihilating that justice which it should have established. He describes the threat of socialism as “philanthropic tyranny,” the enemy to his revered principles of justice, peace, order, stability, harmony, and logic. In clear, concise prose, Bastiat reveals the dangers of government overreach, a philosophy that still inspires libertarian ideology today.

A fascinating look—first published in 1894—at two philanthropists known as the “Prisoner’s Friends” and the early history of prison reform.

Prisons in England were once dark, inhumane places lacking any regulations. The facilities were poorly managed and unsanitary, and prisoners were treated like animals. One man and one woman, the “Prisoner’s Friends,” sought to change that.

Through Prison Bars is an in-depth account of John Howard and Elizabeth Fry and their work in the prison reform movement in Great Britain and Europe that began in the eighteenth century and continued into the nineteenth. Author William H. Render explores their childhoods and family lives, deeply spiritual backgrounds—Howard was a Calvinist while Fry was a dedicated Quaker—and early days in prison philanthropy, as well as what motivated them to get involved in the first place: Howard’s early days as the high sheriff of Bedfordshire and Fry’s visit to the women’s prison at Newgate in London.

Neither Howard nor Fry stopped their work with just one jail. They dedicated their lives to serving God and man, and their stories have the power to inspire similar dedication in generations to come.