When Red, a young boy living on a vast country estate owned by his father, a world-renowned industrialist, finds and captures two small and strange-looking animals, he hides them away in an old bird cage in the loft of his father's barn. He has dreams of making big bucks in a circus sideshow featuri...
Friedrich Engels spent two years (from 1842 to 1844) in Manchester, England, working at his father's factory. During that period he observed and recorded the effect of the industrial revolution on the labor market and the subsequent condition of what became the working class of England. While it is...
Happy Jack is a grey squirrel who lives in the Green Forest. Like most little creatures, he must fend for himself. Happy Jack has discovered a tree that chocked full of hickory nuts. He wants them to be all his own and believes the tree is his because he found the nuts. But his cousin Chatterer the...
It is probably no surprise that Edward Lear felt the need to make children laugh. He was born in 1812 in North London, youngest-but-one of 21 children. Money problems led to his leaving home at the age of four with an older sister, who looked after him as a mother until she died. His health was alwa...
Curiouser and curiouser! The collection of eclectic characters encountered by Alice on her adventures in Wonderland will leave the audience wanting more. The White Rabbit, the Mad Hatter, the Queen, and the Cheshire Cat are all here, and just as crazy as ever. This timeless treasure is fun for young...
The Search After Hapiness was written by Charlotte Brontë when she was 13 years old. It tells the story of a man named Henry O'Donell who leaves his home to seek happiness only to find many years later that it was there all along. This manuscript was one of many tiny handwritten booklets produced by...
Daisy Miller portrays the courtship of a beautiful American girl by Winterbourne, a sophisticated compatriot of hers. His pursuit of her is hampered by her own flirtatiousness, which is frowned upon by the other expatriates when they meet in Switzerland and Italy. Henry James uses Daisy's story to d...
The Victorians had a fondness for scaring their offspring straight with cautionary tales - moral stories featuring children who misbehaved and suffered the consequences. Lewis Carroll mocks them gently when he says that Alice "had read several nice little histories about children who had got burnt,...
Hippolytus, bastard son of Theseus and the Amazon Hippolyta, has sworn chaste allegiance to the goddess Artemis, thus severely offending the goddess Aphrodite by failing to revere her. Aphrodite swears revenge and promises that he will die before the day is done, taking with him Queen Phaedra, wife...
These are the memoirs of the US Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire during World War I, abridged for this production in order to focus on the mass deportations and systematic killings of Turkey's Armenian population. This work is a renowned primary source for this Armenian Genocide, a crime since recog...
The Snow Queen is one of Hans Christian Andersen's most beloved fairy tales. When young Kay is stolen away and cursed with a frozen heart, his closest friend Gerda must make her way across the daunting landscape (with the help of a strange assortment of people and animals) to free him from the palac...
The Way of Life According to Laotzu is a poetic and highly accessible translation of the Dao De Jing (Tao Te Ching). In these 81 brief passages, the ancient Chinese sage lays down a philosophical, socio-political, personal view of the universe and guide for action that has inspired generations aroun...
