Strange Histories presents a serious account of some of the most extraordinary occurrences of European and North American history and explains how they made sense to people living at the time. Using case studies from the Middle Ages and the early modern period, this book provides fascinating insights into the world-view of a vanished age and shows how such occurences fitted in quite naturally with the "common sense" of the time. Explanations of these phenomena, riveting and ultimately rational, encourage further reflection on what shapes our beliefs today. What made reasonable, educated men and women behave in ways that seem utterly nonsensical to us today? This question and many more are answered in this fascinating book.

Reproduction of the original: Strange Stories from History for Young People by George Cary Eggleston

The Strange Stories of Eduardo Capistrano are 13 tales of the fantastic, incorporating supernatural elements to tell eccentric narratives of imagination, illusion and dream. In Horribile Dictu, the incursion of a supernatural investigator into the horror of a family destroyed by the hunger for power of its patriarch. In Umbilical, a psychiatrist tends to an obese patient with a very unusual eating disorder. Strange fortunes befall a man who tried to commit suicide in Paradiso. The Egg, Broken tells the angst of a woman imprisoned in an unhappy relationship, which works a profound transformation. The Spot is a skin disease of a peculiar nature that afflicts a trash collector. A captive man try to refute the insinuations of his mysterious kidnapper in Captor. In Overprotective, a lonely child meets a great mate for his playtime. A pregnant woman disillusioned with religion as an allegory for the losing of faith, in Apostasy. All Saint's Day brings a psychiatrist returning to the ruins of the asylum where he was once a nurse, to find it haunted. A man moves to a street filled with strange occurrences in Wyrd. A man finds himself able to produce money out of nothing in the tale Mammon. In Pinus, a boy befriends the monster in the old armoire of his grandfather. The collection ends with Horses, in which an old man acquires a race horse to keep it from being sacrificed.

A scientist and scholar by trade, Grant Allen was a prodigious writer who dabbled in many different genres over the course of his career, playing a significant role in the development of both detective fiction and science fiction. This collection of short stories runs the gamut in terms of theme and subject matter, but all of the tales highlight Allen's fascination with the weird, mysterious and uncanny.

It is 2025. The Earth reaches the tipping point triggering massive global warming. Climate change, now unstoppable, accelerates. Monster storms rage across the planet, giant wildfires reduce forests, cities, and towns to ash. An ancient virus released from the thawing tundra lays waste to humanity. Lonely survivors of the apocalypse tell their stories of Earth’s last days.

The public has, perhaps, a right to be made acquainted with the title under which I, an unknown writer, come forward as the translator of a difficult Chinese work. In the spring of 1867 I began the study of Chinese at H.B.M.ÕsLegation, Peking, under an implied promise, in a despatch from the then Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, that successful efforts would be rewarded by proportionately rapid advancement in the service of which I was a member. Then followed a long novitiate of utterly uninteresting and, indeed, most repellent labour,Ñinseparable, however, from the acquisition of this language, which throughout its early stages demands more from sheer memory than from the exercise of any other intellectual faculty. At length, in the spring of 1877, while acting as Vice-Consul at Canton, I commenced the translation of the work here offered to the English reader. For such a task I had flattered myself into the belief that I possessed two of the requisite qualifications: an accurate knowledge of the grammatical structure of the language, and an extensive insight into the manners, customs, superstitions, and general social life of the Chinese. I had been variously stationed at Peking, Tientsin, Takow, and Taiwan Fu (in Formosa), Ningpo, Hankow, Swatow, and Canton, from the latter of which I was transferredÑwhen my task was still only half finishedÑto Amoy. I had travelled beyond the Great Wall into Mongolia; and I had made the journey overland from Swatow to Canton, a distance of five hundred miles; besides which, in addition to my study of the language, my daily object in life had always been to familiarise myself as much as possible with Chinese sympathies and habits of thought. With these advantages, and by the interesting nature of the subject-matter, I hoped to be able on the one hand to arouse a somewhat deeper interest than is usually taken in the affairs of China; and, on the other, to correct at any rate some of the erroneous views, too frequently palmed off by inefficient and disingenuous workers, and too readily accepted as fact.Ê