Find Your Next Book
Identify books by subject, category, or length. The finder explains how well each title matches your stated preferences, helping you narrow a catalog of 96 works to a shortlist.
Do more with this book catalog
The OPLAE Modern History Library brings together public-domain accounts of the modern era, with a focus on military conflicts, national development, and social change. The collection spans from the French and Indian War through the World Wars, offering firsthand narratives, regimental histories, and analytical studies.
Whether you are tracing a specific campaign, exploring personal experiences of war, or comparing the lengths and readability of different texts, the tools on this page can help you navigate the catalog. Use the finder to match your interests, the compare tool to weigh similar works, and the reading guide to plan your time.
96
books in this catalog
4
catalog categories
96
books with reading-time data
Made for this collection
Ways the catalog data becomes useful
Compare Editions and Themes
Examine how different books treat related topics, such as the Civil War or the Canadian campaign of 1759. Compare word counts, reading times, and sentence complexity to see which approach suits you.
Plan Your Reading Time
Estimate how long a book will take based on word count and reading speed. Filter by time commitment, from quick reads to marathons, and find titles that fit your schedule.
Choosing a Path Through the Modern History Library
The OPLAE Modern History Library holds 96 public-domain works, most of them focused on North American military and political history from the eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries. With 49 titles in Modern Nations and 27 in World Events, the collection leans heavily toward the American Revolution and the Civil War, but it also reaches into Canadian campaigns, Scottish domestic life, and Russian exile memoirs. That breadth can make browsing feel scattered, which is where the three working tools come in.
Book Finder, Compare Books, and Reading Tracker are designed to work as a sequence rather than as separate utilities. A reader who starts with a vague interest, narrows it with the Finder, tests two or three candidates side by side in Compare, and then sets a page goal in the Tracker will have a clear route from curiosity to finished book. The tools do not rate literary quality; they simply make the catalog's underlying data visible.
Start with the Finder When You Have a Direction
The Finder is the natural entry point because it lets you combine category, length, reading time, chapter rhythm, and sentence flow in one pass. Suppose you know you want a Civil War personal narrative but are not sure whether you can commit to a long regimental history. You can select Modern Nations, choose a medium word count, and then look at the sentence-flow metric to avoid a dense 19th-century prose style. The Finder will return a manageable list, and from there you can move to Compare.
The catalog contains 39 short books (under roughly 40,000 words) and 15 epics, so the length filter can quickly separate a quick read from a season-long project. The chapter-count and density filters add a second layer: a book with many short chapters and low density may feel more approachable than one with the same word count but fewer, longer sections.
Use Compare to Test Real Trade-offs
Once you have two or three candidates, Compare Books shows word count, estimated reading time, text sections, sentence flow, chapter rhythm, and subjects side by side. This is where measurable differences become visible. For example, "Washington the Soldier — Story, Setting & Ideas" runs about 130,650 words with 52 text sections, while a short regimental history like "A Historical Sketch of Company "B," Eighteenth Regiment Ohio Volunteer Infantry Three Months Service" is only 11,831 words in 9 sections. The contrast in scale is obvious, but the section count also hints at how often you might pause.
Sentence flow matters in a different way. A book with a long average sentence length, such as "Life and Remarkable Adventures of Israel R. Potter" at 43.3 words per sentence, will demand more concentration than one with short, punchy sentences like "The war record of the Fifth Company, New England Regiment, Second Plattsburg Training Camp" at 9.2. Neither is better; they simply reward different reading moods.
Compare can also settle a subject overlap question. If you are torn between two books on the same battle, the subjects panel will show whether one includes a prison narrative or a regimental focus that the other lacks.
Commit with the Reading Tracker
After you have chosen a book, the Reading Tracker turns the choice into a schedule. You enter your current page, the total pages, and a daily page goal. The Tracker then estimates the remaining time and finish date. Because the catalog does not always include a fixed page count, the Tracker initially estimates pages by dividing the word count by 250 words per page. You can override that total with the page count from your own edition.
The Tracker stores your progress in the browser, so no account is needed. That makes it a low-friction companion for a long work like "Domestic Annals of Scotland from the Reformation to the Revolution, Volume 2 (of 2)" at 232,899 words. Without a plan, a book of that size can stall; with a daily page goal, even an epic becomes a series of manageable steps.