Find Books
Search by subject, category, or title. The catalog includes works on topics such as caste in South India, women's employment, and North American antiquities.
Do more with this book catalog
This catalog gathers historical and social science texts from the public domain, with a focus on social conditions, society and culture, customs and everyday life, and anthropology. The collection includes 93 books across four categories, offering a window into past societies through primary sources and scholarly works.
Each book has been prepared with reading tools to help you navigate long texts. You can find books by subject or category, compare their length and reading time, and estimate how long it will take to read them. The tools are designed to make exploration straightforward and practical.
Whether you are a student, researcher, or curious reader, the catalog provides a structured way to engage with historical documents. Use the tools to narrow your choices, understand the scope of a text, and plan your reading.
93
books in this catalog
4
catalog categories
93
books with reading-time data
Made for this collection
Ways the catalog data becomes useful
Compare Works
See word counts, reading times, and text sections side-by-side. This helps you gauge the depth and scope of different books.
Estimate Reading Time
Use the median reading speed to estimate how long a book will take to finish. The median book in the catalog takes about 224 minutes to read.
Three Tools for Working with the ITIIC Historical Social Sciences Library
The ITIIC Historical Social Sciences Library holds ninety-three public-domain works that range from a ten-thousand-word treaty pamphlet to a quarter-million-word survey of women's employment. With that spread, a reader can feel pulled in two directions at once: the catalog is small enough to browse, yet the individual books vary so much in length and structure that a single reading plan rarely fits two of them. The hub page brings together Book Finder, Compare Books, and Reading Tracker so that choosing, weighing, and pacing can happen in one place.
Choosing with Book Finder
Book Finder is the starting point when you know roughly what you want to read but not exactly which book. You can filter by category, length, estimated reading time, chapter rhythm, sentence flow, or subject, and you can leave any criterion open without penalty. The catalog's four categories are not equal in size: Social Conditions holds forty-six titles, while Anthropology holds ten, so filtering by category can quickly narrow a large field or reveal a small one.
Suppose you are drawn to the social conditions of Indigenous peoples in North America. A subject search for a term like "Indians of North America" will return several works, but their lengths differ enormously. The Caddo Indians of Louisiana — Reading Notes runs about 14,000 words, while a captivity narrative by John Tanner exceeds 173,000 words. Book Finder lets you set a length or time range to separate a short regional study from a long personal account before you commit.
Comparing Before You Commit
Compare Books is most useful when two or three titles look equally plausible after a Finder search. The comparison panel shows word count, estimated reading time, text sections, sentence flow, chapter rhythm, subjects, and page information when available. These are descriptive metrics, not quality judgments, so they help you anticipate the shape of a book rather than its value.
For example, you might compare a 35,000-word excavation report with twenty-six text sections and short sentences to a 17,000-word study of British trackways with nine sections and longer sentences. The first will feel more segmented, the second more continuous, even though both are moderate in length. Such differences can matter if you read in short sessions or prefer a steady narrative thread.
Planning with Reading Tracker
Once you have chosen a book, Reading Tracker turns its page count into a daily plan. Progress is recorded in pages, with a current page, a total page count, and a daily goal. If the catalog does not provide a fixed page count, the tracker estimates one by dividing the word count by 250 words per page. You can replace that estimate with the total shown by your own reading app or edition.
The tracker also estimates remaining time and finish days based on your daily goal. Because the default goal is twenty pages, a 14,000-word book like The Caddo Indians of Louisiana — Reading Notes might take only a few days, while a 173,000-word narrative could take several weeks at the same pace. The hub links these three tools so that a choice made in Finder can be checked in Compare and then scheduled in Tracker without losing the thread.