Akron Public Library

Charles Dickens was an English short story writer, dramatist, essayist, and the most popular novelist to come out of the Victorian era. Many of his novels, with their frequent concern for social reform, were first published in magazines in serial form under the pseudonym, Boz. Unlike authors who completed entire novels before serialization, Dickens often created the episodes as they were being serialized. The continuing popularity of his novels and...

"The Spinning Jenny was invented in 1770, and with that, a new era of manufacturing and industry changed lives everywhere within a generation. A world filled with unrest wrestles for control over this new world order: A mother's husband is killed in a work accident due to negligence; a young woman fights to fund her school for impoverished children; a well-intentioned young man unexpectedly inherits a failing business; one man ruthlessly protects...

The story of Oliver Twist - orphaned, and set upon by evil and adversity from his first breath - shocked readers when it was published. After running away from the workhouse and pompous beadle Mr Bumble, Oliver finds himself lured into a den of thieves peopled by vivid and memorable characters - the Artful Dodger, vicious burglar Bill Sikes, his dog Bull's Eye, and prostitute Nancy, all watched over by cunning master-thief Fagin. Combining elements...

Through photographs, illustrations, and both factual and fictionalized anecdotes, shows what life was like in the United States during the Depression.

A history of the Reconstruction period and the movements of reform, immigration, industrialization, and urbanization.

A black teacher from British Guiana describes how he overcame the hostility and prejudices of his students in a London slum school.

The sweeping Downton Abbey saga continues, beginning six months after the unexpected death of Matthew Crawley, heir to Downton Abbey, husband to Lady Mary, and brand new father to a baby boy and successor, in a car accident. Although it is the 1920s, Britain still observes mourning rituals that are almost Victorian in their solemnity. Nonetheless, life goes on at Downton Abbey and the Crawleys are beginning to snap out of it.

In this book, Nancy Isenberg reveals that the wretched and landless poor have existed from the time of the earliest British colonial settlements to today's hillbillies. Poor whites were central to the rise of the Republican Party in the early nineteenth century and the Civil War itself was fought over class issues nearly as much as it was fought over slavery. Reconstruction pitted white trash against newly freed slaves, which factored in the rise...