About 23 minutes
The Care of the Dead — Inside the Classic
World Events
5,270 recorded words. Selected by the catalog's stored reading-time estimate.
View Gutenberg source #47149
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Start with a reading choice
Three of the shortest recorded reading commitments in this catalog. Times are estimates, not quality ratings.
About 42 minutes
Reminiscences of the Chattanooga campaign A paper read at the reunion of Company B, Fortieth Ohio volunteer infantry, at Xenia, O., August 22, 1894 — Story, Setting & Ideas
Modern Nations
9,573 recorded words. Selected by the catalog's stored reading-time estimate.
View Gutenberg source #68095About 50 minutes
The Good Old Songs We Used to Sing, '61 to '65 — Inside the Classic
Modern Nations
11,302 recorded words. Selected by the catalog's stored reading-time estimate.
View Gutenberg source #21566Search the excerpts stored with this catalog
94 of 94 catalog books have a stored excerpt with a Gutenberg source record. Search covers these excerpts only, up to 6,000 characters per book. A missing match does not mean the phrase is absent from the full work.
Read a catalog excerpt example: At Suvla Bay Being the notes and sketches of scenes, characters and adventures of the Dardanelles campaign, made by John Hargrave ("White Fox") while serving with the 32nd — Edition Insights
I. IN WHICH MY KING AND COUNTRY NEED ME II. A LONG WAY TO TIPPERARY VII. MEDITERRANEAN NIGHTS VIII. THE CITY OF WONDERFUL COLOUR IX. MAROONED ON LEMNOS ISLAND XIII. THE ADVENTURE OF THE WHITE PACK-MULE XIV. THE SNIPER OF PEAR-TREE GULLY XVI. THE ADVENTURE OF THE LOST SQUADS XVII. “OH, TO BE IN ENGLAND!” XVIII. TWO MEN RETURN XX. “JHILL-O! JOHNNIE!” XXIII. THE WISDOM OF FATHER S---- XXIV. THE SHARP-SHOOTERS XXV. A SCOUT AT SULVA BAY CHAPTER I. IN WHICH MY KING AND COUNTRY NEED ME I…
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Compare two books and their available excerpts
| Book | Recorded words | Estimated minutes | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Care of the Dead — Inside the Classic | 5,270 | 23 | Gutenberg #47149 |
| Reminiscences of the Chattanooga campaign A paper read at the reunion of Company B, Fortieth Ohio volunteer infantry, at Xenia, O., August 22, 1894 — Story, Setting & Ideas | 9,573 | 42 | Gutenberg #68095 |
| The Good Old Songs We Used to Sing, '61 to '65 — Inside the Classic | 11,302 | 50 | Gutenberg #21566 |
How these choices and excerpts are prepared
Choices use stored catalog measurements. Estimates vary with reading speed. A shared category is a catalog label, not a claim that two books have the same argument or literary quality.
Search reads excerpt text stored with this catalog and links to its associated Gutenberg record. The connection is stored in the site database; this tool does not recheck that every excerpt is word-for-word identical to that external record. Excerpt search does not cover every chapter and does not verify historical publication dates.
Catalog snapshot checked: 2026-09-25. Coverage: 94 public books, 94 available source excerpts.
Do more with this book catalog
The LIGOB Modern History Library brings together 94 public-domain works that trace the making of the modern world. You can explore revolutions, social change, and major conflicts through primary accounts and historical studies, each presented with tools that help you find, compare, and plan your reading.
The collection is organized into four areas: Modern Nations, World Events, Revolutions, and Social History. Across these categories you'll find personal narratives, campaign histories, biographies, and contemporary analyses. The reader tools on this page are designed to help you navigate this material by subject, length, and reading time.
94
books in this catalog
4
catalog categories
94
books with reading-time data
Made for this collection
Ways the catalog data becomes useful
Find Your Book
Use the Finder to match books to your interests. Filter by category, subject, length, or reading time to see which works fit your preferences best.
Compare Books
The Compare tool lets you look at key details side by side, such as word count, sections, and sentence complexity, so you can see how different titles relate.
Plan Your Reading
The Reading tool estimates how long a book will take based on its length and your pace. It also breaks down the text into sections for a clearer picture of its structure.
Choosing, Comparing, and Planning Your Reading
The LIGOB Modern History Library holds 94 titles that range from short personal narratives to multi-volume campaign histories. The hub links three tools—Book Finder, Compare Books, and Reading Tracker—each designed to support a different stage of engagement with the collection. None of these tools rate literary quality; they help you decide what to read, how two or three books differ, and how to pace your progress.
A practical approach is to start with Book Finder when you are exploring, move to Compare Books when you have narrowed to a few candidates, and then use Reading Tracker once you have committed to a title. For example, if you are drawn to maritime disasters, the finder can surface Sinking of the "Titanic" — Themes and Context (id 305), a 104,147-word account with 13 text sections. Comparing it with a shorter work like A Noble Woman: The Life-Story of Edith Cavell — A Reader’s Guide (id 242) at 29,374 words shows how the tools reveal different commitments.
When to Use Book Finder
Book Finder is the entry point for most readers because it lets you filter by category, length, reading time, chapter rhythm, sentence flow, and subjects. The catalog’s four categories—Modern Nations (46 titles), World Events (28), Revolutions (10), and Social History (10)—provide a broad initial partition. If you know you want a concise account of a specific event, you can set the length filter to short and the time filter to quick, which narrows the field considerably.
The finder also accommodates readers who have only a vague sense of what they want. You can leave all criteria at no-preference, and the tool will not penalize any book. This is useful when you are new to the collection and want to browse without imposing arbitrary constraints. The subject filters are particularly helpful for thematic research, such as locating all five titles tagged World War, 1914-1918 or the three Civil War campaign narratives.
Once you have a shortlist, the finder’s role ends. It is not designed to show side-by-side comparisons or to help you estimate how long a book will take to finish. That is where the other two tools come in.
How Compare and Tracker Complete the Workflow
Compare Books accepts two or three selected titles and displays word count, estimated reading time, text sections, sentence flow, chapter rhythm, and subjects. This is valuable when you are torn between books that appear similar in the finder. For instance, comparing Sinking of the "Titanic" — Themes and Context (id 305) with A Noble Woman: The Life-Story of Edith Cavell — A Reader’s Guide (id 242) reveals that the Titanic book is roughly 3.5 times longer and has more than four times the text sections, suggesting a more sustained reading commitment.
After you choose, Reading Tracker helps you plan daily progress. It records pages, not minutes or sections, so you set a daily page goal and the tool calculates estimated finish days. The default goal is 20 pages per day, but you can adjust it to match your schedule. For a 104,147-word book, the initial page estimate is about 417 pages (using a 250-word-per-page conversion), which at 20 pages per day would take roughly 21 days. The tracker also lets you override the total page count if your edition differs.
Using the three tools in sequence—filter, compare, then track—turns an overwhelming catalog into a manageable reading plan. The hub exists to make that workflow explicit, so you can move fluidly from discovery to commitment without losing sight of what each tool is for.