Edward Eggleston

First published in 1885, "Stories of Great Americans for Little Americans" is the charming and engaging American history book for children by Edward Eggleston. Best known for his "Hoosier" series, which depicted the life of a school teacher in rural Indiana in the mid-1800s, Eggleston was an American historian, Methodist preacher, and prolific author. Written to be accessible and engaging for elementary school children, Eggleston introduces many famous...

Published in 1872, this novel sets a love story amidst the utopian Millerite sect in pioneer Indiana with its belief in a coming apocalypse "sometime between March 21, 1843 and March 21, 1844," (in the words of its charismatic leader, William Miller).

This 1873 novel, set in a fictional Minnesota town during a real-estate bubble, describes the carving up of the American frontier by the sharp speculators who helped to usher in the Gilded Age. The story of greed and deception is both timely and timeless.

Published in 1891, this was Eggleston's final novel, before he turned his hand exclusively to history. Here Eggleston satirizes the wealthy followers of Christian Science and faith healing. "The book was not written to depreciate anyone's valued delusions," he writes in his Preface, "but to make a study of human nature under certain modern conditions."

Based on the author's own life as well as the life of Ohio itinerant preacher Jacob Young, this 1874 novel of a frontier Methodist minister and Bible agent presents a rollicking yet realistic view of early American life in the Midwest. Corn-shuckings, camp meetings, revivals, revels, and highwaymen color this novel-as-social-history.