| 400s BC | The Art of War | Sun Tzu |
| 375 BC | Republic | Plato |
| 200s AD | Parallel Lives | Plutarch |
| 1517 | Ninety-five Theses | Martin Luther |
| 1532 | The Prince | Niccolò Machiavelli |
| 1653 | The Compleat Angler | Izaak Walton |
| 1732-1758 | Poor Richard's Almanack | Benjamin Franklin |
| 1776 | Common Sense | Thomas Paine |
| 1776 | The Wealth of Nations | Adam Smith |
| 1788 | The Federalist Papers | Alexander Hamilton, James Madison & John Jay |
| 1825 | Pepys' Diary | Samuel Pepys |
| 1828 | American Dictionary of the English Language | Noah Webster |
| 1848 | The Communist Manifesto | Karl Marx |
| 1849 | Civil Disobedience | Henry David Thoreau |
| 1854 | Walden; or, Life in the Woods | Henry David Thoreau |
| 1855 | Bartlett's Familiar Quotations | John Bartlett |
| 1859 | On the Origin of Species | Charles Darwin |
| 1867 | Das Kapital | Karl Marx |
| 1883 | Life on the Mississippi | Mark Twain |
| 1898 | J'Accuse | Émile Zola |
