What's better than diving into a new ebook? Knowing that you got it for free. Check out these fascinating history accounts that are free to download for the whole month.
Twelve Years a Slave
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.
The Land of Little Rain
A stirring tribute to the unique beauty of the American Southwest
In the region stretching from the High Sierras south of Yosemite to the Mojave Desert, water is scarce and empty riverbeds hint at a lush landscape that has long since vanished. But the desert is far from lifeless. For those who know where to look, the “land of little rain” is awash in wonders.
Two Years Before the Mast
In this 19th-century nautical memoir, a Harvard man sails around the tip of South America to California—and returns with this classic tale of adventure.
In 1834, 19-year-old Richard Henry Dana left Harvard University to enlist as a deckhand on a brig sailing from Boston to the California coast. For the next two years, he recorded the terrifying storms, awe-inspiring beauty, and dreadful hardships of the journey in a diary he would later expand into this riveting memoir of “the life of a common sailor at sea as it really is.”
The Life of Charlotte Bronte
The author of Jayne Eyre is brought to life by her friend and fellow novelist in “one of the most remarkable literary biographies in English prose” (The Guardian).
First published in 1857, The Life of Charlotte Brontë presents an intimate portrait of the celebrated author through the eyes of Elizabeth Gaskell, a personal friend of Brontë’s and fellow trailblazer of Victorian-era literature. Drawing from hundreds of Brontë’s letters, Gaskell illuminates what she described as a “wild, sad life and the beautiful character that grew out of it.”
Featured image: Pedro Fleitas / Unsplash
