Galusha A. Grow: Father of the Homestead Law Book

This book was apparently written with the younger reader in mind but please do not assume it is written down to that level. It does contain a lot of information and many of us, even older readers, would need to have a dictionary handy while reading it.

I came to this book after reading Tolstoy's 'War and Peace'. I realised that I had a very poor knowledge of European history and decided to improve it a little. I started with a biography of Napoleon and then moved onto this book. It does cover a lot of ground and perhaps in some areas does not go very deep. I see it as a starting point. Often Wikipedia has more on a person or incident that interested me but without this book perhaps I might not have known where to start with Wikipedia.

I now have a broader view and have some leads to what I might read next but I must say that the author does have biasses. The book is written very much from a Christian viewpoint. He is very critical of the French Revolution because of all the violence involved. But in his introduction to the chapter on Napoleon he says 'while war is so awful, and attended with all the evils of which we can conceive, or which it is the doom of man to suffer, yet warriors are not necessarily the enemies of mankind. They are the instruments of the Almighty to scourge a wicked world, or to bring, out of disaster and suffering, great and permanent blessings to the human race.' Reading on, he does seem to have a love-hate view of Napoleon but he doesn't like to admit that anything good came from the French Revolution because it was based on non-religious philosophies.

I read this as an ebook, downloaded for free from Project Gutenberg.