Free History Books to Download in November 2024

The world’s most influential treatise on strategy

Mao Zedong used it to defeat Chiang Kai-shek. Colin Powell thinks every US soldier should be familiar with its principles. New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick built a football dynasty out of lessons learned within its pages. Even Gordon Gekko and Tony Soprano are fans.
In the twenty-five hundred years since it was composed, The Art of War has been applied to just about every field of human endeavor. Sun Tzu’s shrewd advice is indispensible to anyone seeking to gain an advantage over an opponent.

The memoirs of a brilliant and beloved Founding Father

Printer, author, scientist, inventor, statesman, revolutionary—arguably no American life has been more remarkable than Benjamin Franklin’s.

Penned between 1771 and 1790 and published after his death, the unfinished Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin is one of the most acclaimed and widely read personal histories ever written. From his youth as a printer’s assistant working for his brother’s Boston newspaper through his own publishing, writing, and military careers, his scientific experiments and worldwide travels, his grand triumphs and heartbreaking tragedies, Franklin tells his story with aplomb, bringing to life the flesh-and-blood man behind the American icon.

A unique and accessible history of England from one of the country’s preeminent thinkers

Published in 1917, A Short History of England is a “popular book of history” told through the layman’s eyes. G. K. Chesterton takes the reader on brisk, casual strolls through the annals of Anglo-Saxon history by discussing key topics and periods, including “The Defeat of the Barbarians,” “The Problem of the Plantagenets,” and “Nationality and the French Wars,” in clear and insightful prose.

A fascinating collection of short pieces that bring the past to stimulating life, A Short History of England is a testament to the unique qualities that, according to George Bernard Shaw, made Chesterton “at once the most concise and the fullest historian this distressful country has yet found.”

Tormented by her master, a young mother plots a daring escape, in this courageous and captivating slave narrative

When her mother dies, six-year-old slave girl Linda Brent is sent to the big house, where she grows up serving a gentle mistress who teaches her to read and write. But the mistress’s death brings about a sudden and terrible change in Linda’s fortunes.

Her lecherous new master torments Linda mercilessly, making her life a living hell. Unable to join her two young children in their escape to the North, Linda hides in the attic above her grandmother’s house. For seven years, she waits for the opportunity to flee North Carolina and reunite with her son and daughter in the land of freedom. But when the chance finally comes, Linda discovers she has yet more pain to endure.

Based on the true story of Harriet Jacobs’s escape from the South, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is one of American literature’s most powerful indictments of the evils of slavery.