"Dickens creates the Victorian city of Coketown in Northern England to critique the industrialist economy he believed exploited the lives of the working class, destroying human creativity and joy in the process. He brilliantly caricatures the monotony of an increasingly practical world where facts are amassed for their own sake at the expense of a more humane and varied existence."--Provided by Publisher.

Uncle Tom's Cabin, or Life Among the Lowly is an anti-slavery novel by American author Harriet Beecher Stowe. The lives and losses of slaves in the American south are portrayed in this unflinching indictment of slavery. The book is credited with helping fuel the abolitionist cause in the 1850s and it helped lay the groundwork for the Civil War. In the first year after the novel was published, 300,000 copies were sold in the United States and one million...

These forty-eight biographies by the ancient Greek scholar demonstrate the parallel lives of famous rulers such as Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar. A Greek priest of Delphi who acquired Roman citizenship later in life, Plutarch undertook his Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans to demonstrate the influence of character on the fates of famous men. He also wished to show that the legacy and achievements of his native Greece were no less impressive...