Helen Plum Library

On August 18, 1648, with no relief from the siege in sight, the royalist garrison holding Colchester Castle surrendered and Oliver Cromwell's army firmly ended the rule of Charles I of England. To send a clear message to the fallen monarch, the rebels executed four of the senior officers captured at the castle. Yet still, the king refused to accept he had lost the war. As France and other allies mobilized in support of Charles, a tribunal was hastily...

"The only legitimate child of Lord Byron, the most brilliant, revered, and scandalous of the Romantic poets, Ada was destined for fame long before her birth. Estranged from Ada's father, who was infamously "mad, bad, and dangerous to know," Ada's mathematician mother is determined to save her only child from her perilous Byron heritage. Banishing fairy tales and make-believe from the nursery, Ada's mother provides her daughter with a rigorous education...

"With Great Expectations, Dickens applied his bravura storytelling abilities to a familiar subject for a novelist: a young person's coming of age. Over the course of the novel, Pip struggles to define himself and to make his way through a world populated by escaped convicts, cruel guardians, and the unforgettable Miss Havisham, the jilted bride trapped in the disappointments and regrets of the past. Introduced by esteemed critic Harold Bloom, this...

Charles Darwin knew that there was a significant event in the history of life that his theory did not explain. In what is known today as the "Cambrian explosion," 530 million years ago many animals suddenly appeared in the fossil record without apparent ancestors in earlier layers of rock. In Darwin's Doubt Stephen C. Meyer tells the story of the mystery surrounding this explosion of animal life -- a mystery that has intensified, not only because...

A powerful blend of history, biography, and adventure, ORPHAN TRAINS fills a grievous gap in the American story. Tracing the evolution of the Children’s Aid Society, this dramatic narrative tells the fascinating tale of one of the most famous — and sometimes infamous — child welfare programs: the orphan trains, which spirited away some 250,000 abandoned children into the homes of rural families in the Midwest. In mid-nineteenth-century...

Provides an in-depth critical introduction to the short stories of Charles W. Chesnutt. Includes a detailed analyses of every significant story, biographical information, a chronology of the artist's life and works, and a representative selection of critical responses.

"On the rainy morning of May 20, 1927, a little-known American pilot named Charles A. Lindbergh climbed into his single-engine monoplane, the Spirit of St. Louis, and prepared to take off from a small airfield on Long Island, New York. Despite his inexperience--the twenty-five-year-old Lindbergh had never before flown over open water--he was determined to win the $25,000 Orteig Prize promised since 1919 to the first pilot to fly nonstop between New...

In a country far away, a new invention--the mechanical mousetrap--has caused all the mice but one to flee to America. Now stranded in a dangerous country, the last mouse decides to build a plane and fly to the land of freedom

Lytton Strachey's biographical essays on four 'eminent Victorians' dropped a depth-charge on Victorian England when the book was published in 1918. This edition is fully annotated and draws on the full-range of Strachey's manuscript materials and literary remains

Celebrate the 50th anniversary of Peanuts--and the life of its creator--with the only collection of the last year of the strip, including Schulz's unforgettable farewell. Full color