Excerpts from the Wikipedia Entry 
Psychopathia Sexualis ("Psychopathy of Sex"), his best-known work. He wrote in the introduction that he had "deliberately chosen a scientific term for the name of the book to discourage lay readers". He also wrote "sections of the book in Latin for the same purpose". The book went on to be highly popular and saw many reprintings. This was one of the first books to study sexual topics such as the importance of clitoral orgasm and female sexual pleasure, consideration of the mental states of sexual offenders in judging their actions, and the first scientific discussion of homosexuality. His was one of the most influential books on human sexuality prior to Freud. At the time of publication the author was both praised and condemned for the book.

He divided sexual deviance into four categories:

• paradoxia, sexual desire at the wrong time of life, i.e. childhood or old age 
• anesthesia, insufficient desire 
• hyperesthesia, excessive desire 
• paraesthesia, sexual desire for the wrong goal or object. This included homosexuality (or "contrary sexual desire"), sexual fetishism, sadism, masochism, pederasty and so on. 

Krafft-Ebing was of the belief that the  purpose of sexual desire was procreation, and any form of desire that didn't go towards that ultimate goal was a perversion. Rape, for instance, was an aberrant act, but not a perversion, since pregnancy could result. Following his research on homosexuals Krafft-Ebing reached the conclusion that both male and female homosexuals did not suffer from mental illness or perversion (as persistent popular belief held).

He considered homosexuality an anomalous process developed during the gestation of the embryo and fetus, evolving into a sexual inversion of the brain. Some years later he changed the term anomaly to differentiation. It should be noted that most contemporary psychiatrists no longer consider homosexual practices as pathological (as Krafft-Ebing did in his first studies.

BIOGRAPHY
Ref: Everything2

Richard von Krafft-Ebing, sometimes referred to as the father of sexology, was the first psychiatrist to attempt to conduct a systematic, scientific study of atypical sexuality, or "degenerate perversity" as he called it. Krafft-Ebing's theories and case studies were considered scandalous when published in the late 19th century due to his graphic descriptions of masturbation, homosexuality, and fetishism. In contemporary times, almost all of his theories have been debunked, but his work is preserved as a matter of historical interest.

Krafft-Ebing was born on August 14, 1840 in Mannheim, Germany. He was educated in Germany and Switzerland, and began a successful career as a psychiatrist and neurologist. He was appointed professor of psychiatry at Strasbourg in 1872, and later at Vienna in 1889. He died in Graz, Austria on December 22, 1902.

In 1886, Krafft-Ebing's seminal work, Psychopathia Sexualis, was published and almost immediately stirred controversy. The book was directed at psychotherapists and other medical professionals who wished to study and potentially treat patients who suffered from sexual abnormalities, but it quickly gained notoriety in non-medical circles. It consisted of over 200 case studies of sexually aberrant individuals, vividly describing deviations such as sadomasochism, bestiality, pedophilia, necrophilia, and a host of other fetishes that would, in today's parlance, fall under the umbrella term paraphilia. Krafft-Ebing is responsible for coining much of the fetish terminology still used today (for instance, he was the first to use "sadism," named for the Marquis de Sade, and "masochism," for Leopold von Sacher-Masoch). Krafft-Ebing erroneously concluded that because most of his deviant patients admitted to masturbating, masturbation must be the primary cause of sexual deviation. This finding, of course, neglects the obvious fact that the vast majority of people that Krafft-Ebing would consider normal also masturbate.

In particular, Krafft-Ebing held an overwhelming interest (one might even call it a morbid fascination) with homosexuality. He is responsible for popularizing the term "homosexual" as a way of recognizing that homosexuality is as much an issue of identity as it is an issue of sexual conduct with members of the same sex (prior to Krafft-Ebing, homosexuals were generally classified as sodomites or pederasts, based on the nature of the sexual acts themselves). Krafft-Ebing theorized that homosexuality is a mental illness manifested as a gender inversion, neatly (albeit incorrectly) explaining the stereotype of gay males as effeminate, and lesbians as mannish. He was especially interested in male homosexuality, and, as with his theories regarding other sexual abnormalities, Krafft-Ebing pegged masturbation as the culprit. Male masturbation supposedly arrested the development of normal erotic instincts, leading to impotence with women and encouraging male-male sexual activity.

Krafft-Ebing wrote exclusively in German, and for the most part, English speaking readers only have access to two translated editions of Psychopathia Sexualis. Based on this limited segment of Krafft-Ebing's work, contemporary psychologists and sexologists view Krafft-Ebing as a sort of demonic pioneer who simultaneously advanced sexology by legitimizing the scientific study of sexuality, but also had a negative impact on sexology because of his backwards ideas and tendency to couch his observations in terms of morality. Thus, Krafft-Ebing is largely considered a hypocritical dirty old man who wrote a laughable manual on kinky sexual practices.

While this characterization may hold some truth, recent interest in the history of sexology has unearthed a wealth of material related to Krafft-Ebing's work that may redeem him somewhat. In fact, he published 11 different editions of Psychopathia Sexualis during his lifetime, each of which contained substantial revisions to his original theories. He also wrote over 25 scholarly books and innumerable papers on a wide variety of subjects, from menstruation to hypnotism. In 1992, previously unpublished papers, including more than 1500 case studies, were discovered in the attic of the Krafft-Ebing family home in Graz. Of particular note is the evolution of Krafft-Ebing's theories regarding homosexuality. Eventually, he came to believe that most homosexuality is due to "degenerate heredity" and therefore is not under anyone's control, although he still considered masturbation to be a possible contributing factor. While he continued to regard most homoerotic behavior (especially anal sex) as perverted and immoral, he was also surprised to find that love played a significant role in same-sex relationships. Based on his studies (and one suspects, perhaps, a bit of personal experience), Krafft-Ebing eventually concluded that homosexual love is equivalent to heterosexual love, and became a staunch advocate for the decriminalization of homosexuality.

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OTHER
The Chinese Boy and Girl. ~ New York: Fleming H Revell, 1901.

PREFACE 
Until within the past ten years a study of Chinese court life would have been an impossibility. The Emperor, the Empress Dowager, and the court ladies were shut up within the Forbidden City, away from a world they were anxious to see, and which was equally anxious to see them. Then the Emperor instituted reform, the Empress Dowager came out from behind the screen, and the court entered into social relations with Europeans. 

For twenty years and more Mrs. Headland has been physician to the family of the Empress Dowager's mother, the Empress' sister, and many of the princesses and high official ladies in Peking. She has visited them in a social as well as a professional way, has taken with her her friends, to whom the princesses have shown many favours, and they have themselves been constant callers at our home. It is to my wife, therefore, that I am indebted for much of the information contained in this book. 

There are many who have thought that the Empress Dowager has been misrepresented. The world has based its judgment of her character upon her greatest mistake, her participation in the Boxer movement, which seems unjust, and has closed its eyes to the tremendous reforms which only her mind could conceive and her hand carry out. The great Chinese officials to a man recognized in her a mistress of every situation; the foreigners who have come into most intimate contact with her, voice her praise; while her hostile critics are confined for the most part to those who have never known her. It was for this reason that a more thorough study of her life was undertaken. 

It has also been thought that the Emperor has been misunderstood, being overestimated by some, and underestimated by others, and this because of his peculiar type of mind and character. That he was unusual, no one will deny; that he was the originator of many of China's greatest reform measures, is equally true; but that he lacked the power to execute what he conceived, and the ability to select great statesmen to assist him, seems to have been his chief shortcoming. 

To my wife for her help in the preparation of this volume, and to my father-in-law, Mr. William Sinclair, M. A., for his suggestions, I am under many obligations. 

I. T. H. 

Edward Phillips Oppenheim was born on 22 October 1866, in London, England. His father Edward John Oppenheim was a leather merchant, his mother Henrietta Susannah Temperley Budd. He attended the Wyggeston grammar school in Leicester. When he was sixteen years old he left school to assist his father in his leather business for twenty years. When his father died, Oppenheim concentrated on his writing. Oppenheim published over 150 books and countless magazine stories between 1884 and 1946. While most often identified as a mystery writer, Oppenheim's novels range from spy thrillers to romance. All of them have, however, an undertone of intrigue. Several of his books were published under the pseudonym, Anthony Partridge.

From Who Was Who in America
Verrill, Alpheus Hyatt, author, illustrator, naturalist, explorer and science fiction writer of the 20s and 30s, was born in New Haven, Conn., 23 July 1871, the son of Addison Emery and Flora L. (Smith) Verrill; educated at Hopkins Grammar School; Yale School of Fine Arts; spl. Course in zoology under his father; married Kathryn L. McCarthy, 21 January 1892; children --- Dorothy I (Mrs. Russell Rhodes), Eric E. (dec.), Loyola K. (Mrs F. Cintron., jr), Valerie G. (Mrs. P. A. C. Ellis) (dec.); married a second time to Lida Ruth Shaw, 11 November 1944. Illustrated Natural History department Webster’s International Dictionary, 1896; Clarendon Dictionary; many scientific reports and other publications; Invented autochrome process (photography in natural colors), 1902. Extnsive explorations in Bermuda, West Indies, Guiana, Central America, Panama, 1889-1920; rediscovered supposedly extinct Solenodon parodoxus in Santo Domingo, 1907. Resided Dominica, British West Indies 1913-1917; Panama 1917-21. Author of more than 105 books on adventure subjects, natural history, travel and books for boys, the latest being The Real Americans, 1954. Contributor to numerous magazines. Made ethnological expeditions to Panama, Peru, Bolivia, Chili, and Surinam, 1916-28; archaeological expeditions, Central America 1924-1927; discovered remains of unknown prehistoric culture and carried on extensive excavations, Panama, 1924-27; engaged in making series of oil paintings of South and Central American Indians from life, 1926-28; archaeological expeditions Peru and Bolivia 1928-1932; in charge of expeditions 1933, 34, salvaging Spanish galleon sunk in West Indies in 17th century; expedition to the West Indies 1948; expedition to Mexico, 1953. In 1940 he established the Anhiarka Exploratory Gardens and Natural Science Museum at the site of the ancient Indian village of Anhiarka where DeSoto made his first settlement in Florida.; in 1944 established a shell business in Lake Worth, Florida. Home: Route 1, Box 254, Chiefland, Florida. Died November 14, 1954. Buried in the Chiefland Cemetery. 

Books by Verrill
Published Articles

OTHER
Down to the Sea in Ships By Irvin Anthony; Illustrated with Photographs, Prints and Drawings ~ Philadelphia The Penn publishing company 1924. 1st Edition. No. of pages: 358
The Saga of the Bounty
Paddle Wheels & Pistols ~ NY, Grosset & Dunlap. 1929

By Emerson Hough in 1918

The frontier! There is no word in the English language more stirring, more intimate, or more beloved. It has in it all the elan of the old French phrase, En avant! It carries all of the old Saxon command, Forward!! It means all that America ever meant. It means the old hope of a real personal liberty, and yet a real human advance in character and achievement. To a genuine American it is the dearest word in all the world.

What is, or was, the frontier? Where was it? Under what stars did it lie? Because, as the vague Iliads of ancient heroes or the nebulous records of the savage gentlemen of the Middle Ages make small specific impingement on our consciousness today, so also even now begin the tales of our own old frontier to assume a haziness, an unreality, which makes them seem less history than folklore. 

Now the truth is that the American frontier of history has many a local habitation and many a name. And this is why it lies somewhat indefinite under the blue haze of the years, all the more alluring for its lack of definition, like some old mountain range, the softer and more beautiful for its own shadows.

The fascination of the frontier is and has ever been an undying thing. Adventure is the meat of the strong men who have built the world for those more timid. Adventure and the frontier are one and inseparable. They suggest strength, courage, hardihood--qualities beloved in men since the world began--qualities which are the very soul of the United States, itself an experiment, an adventure, a risk accepted. Take away all our history of political regimes, the story of the rise and fall of this or that partisan aggregation in our government; take away our somewhat inglorious military past; but leave us forever the tradition of the American frontier! There lies our comfort and our pride. There we never have failed. There, indeed, we always realized our ambitions. There, indeed, we were efficient, before that hateful phrase was known. There we were a melting-pot for character, before we came to know that odious appellation which classifies us as the melting-pot of the nations.

The frontier was the place and the time of the strong man, of the self-sufficient but restless individual. It was the home of the rebel, the protestant, the unreconciled, the intolerant, the ardent--and the resolute. It was not the conservative and tender man who made our history; it was the man sometimes illiterate, oftentimes uncultured, the man of coarse garb and rude weapons. But the frontiersmen were the true dreamers of the nation. They really were the possessors of a national vision. Not statesmen but riflemen and riders made America. The noblest conclusions of American history still rest upon premises which they laid.

But, in its broadest significance, the frontier knows no country.  It lies also in other lands and in other times than our own. When and what was the Great Frontier? We need go back only to the time of Drake and the sea-dogs, the Elizabethan Age, when all North America was a frontier, almost wholly unknown, compellingly alluring to all bold men. That was the day of new stirrings in the human heart. Some strange impulse seemed to act upon the soul of the braver and bolder Europeans; and they moved westward, nor could have helped that had they tried. They lived largely and blithely, and died handsomely, those old Elizabethan adventurers, and they lie today in thousands of unrecorded graves upon two continents, each having found out that any place is good enough for a man to die upon, provided that he be a man.

The American frontier was Elizabethan in its quality--childlike, simple, and savage. It has not entirely passed; for both Elizabethan folk and Elizabethan customs are yet to be found in the United States. While the half-savage civilization of the farther West was roaring on its way across the continent—while the day of the keelboatman and the plainsman, of the Indian-fighter and the miner, even the day of the cowboy, was dawning and setting--there still was a frontier left far behind in the East, near the top of the mountain range which made the first great barrier across our pathway to the West. That frontier, the frontier of Boone and Kenton, of Robertson and Sevier, still exists and may be seen in the Cumberland--the only remaining part of America which is all American. There we may find trace of the Elizabethan Age--idioms lost from English literature and American speech long ago. There we may see the American home life as it went on more than a hundred years ago. We may see hanging on the wall the long muzzle-loading rifle of an earlier day. We may see the spinning-wheel and the loom. The women still make in part the clothing for their families, and the men still make their own household furniture, their own farming implements, their own boots.

This overhanging frontier of America is a true survival of the days of Drake as well as of the days of Boone. The people are at once godly and savage. They breed freely; they love their homes; they are ever ready for adventure; they are frugal, abstemious, but violent and strong. They carry on still the half-religious blood feuds of the old Scotch Highlands or the North of Ireland, whence they came. They reverence good women. They care little for material accumulations. They believe in personal ease and personal independence. With them life goes on not in the slow monotony of reiterated performance, but in ragged profile, with large exertions followed by large repose. Now that has been the fashion of the frontier in every age and every land of all the world. And so, by studying these people, we may even yet arrive at a just and comprehensive notion of what we might call the "feel" of the old frontier.

There exists, too, yet another Saxon frontier in a far-off portion of the world. In that strange country, Australia, tremendous unknown regions still remain, and the wild pastoral life of such regions bids fair to exist yet for many years. A cattle king of Queensland held at one time sixty thousand square miles of land. It is said that the average size of pastoral holdings in the northern territory of Australia is two hundred and seventy-five thousand acres. Does this not recall the old times of free range in the American West?

This strange antipodal civilization also retains a curious flavor of Elizabethan ideas. It does not plan for inordinate fortunes, the continual amassing of money, but it does deliberately plan for the use by the individual of his individual life. Australian

business hours are shorter than American. Routine is less general. The individual takes upon himself a smaller load of effort. He is restive under monotony. He sets aside a great part of his life for sport. He lives in a large and young day of the world. Here we may see a remote picture of our own American West--better, as it seems to me, than that reflected in the rapid and wholly commercialized development of Western Canada, which is not flavored by any age but this.

But much of the frontier of Australia is occupied by men of means who had behind them government aid and a semi-paternal encouragement in their adventures. The same is true in part of the government-fostered settlement of Western Canada. It was not so with the American West. Here was not the place of the rich man but of the poor man, and he had no one to aid him or encourage him. Perhaps no man ever understood the American West who did not himself go there and make his living in that country, as did the men who found it and held it first. Each life on our old frontier was a personal adventure. The individual had no government behind him and he lacked even the protection of any law.

Our frontier crawled west from the first seaport settlements, afoot, on horseback, in barges, or with slow wagon-trains. It crawled across the Alleghanies, down the great river valleys and up them yet again; and at last, in days of new transportation, it leaped across divides, from one river valley to another. Its history, at first so halting, came to be very swift--so swift that it worked great elisions in its own story.

In our own day, however, the Old West generally means the old cow country of the West--the high plains and the lower foothills running from the Rio Grande to the northern boundary. The still more ancient cattle-range of the lower Pacific Slope will never come into acceptance as the Old West . Always, when we use these words, we think of buffalo plains and of Indians, and of their passing before the footmen and riders who carried the phantom flag of Drake and the Virgin Queen from the Appalachians to the Rockies--before the men who eventually made good that glorious and vaunting vision of the Virginia cavaliers, whose party turned back from the Rockfish Gap after laying claim in the name of King George on all the country lying west of them, as far as the South Sea!

The American cow country may with very good logic arrogate to itself the title of the real and typical frontier of all the world. We call the spirit of the frontier Elizabethan, and so it was; but even as the Elizabethan Age was marked by its contact with the Spanish civilization in Europe, on the high seas, and in both the Americas, so the last frontier of the American West also was affected, and largely, deeply, by Spanish influence and Spanish customs. The very phraseology of range work bears proof of this. Scores of Spanish words are written indelibly in the language of the Plains. The frontier of the cow-range never was Saxon alone.

It is a curious fact also, seldom if ever noted, that this Old West of the Plains was very largely Southern and not Northern on its Saxon side. No States so much as Kentucky and Tennessee and, later, Missouri--daughters of Old Virginia in her glory--contributed to the forces of the frontiersmen. Texas, farther to the south, put her stamp indelibly upon the entire cattle industry of the West. Visionary, impractical, restless, adventurous, these later Elizabethan heroes--bowing to no yoke, insisting on their own rights and scorning often the laws of others, yet careful to retain the best and most advantageous customs of any conquered country--naturally came from those nearest Elizabethan countries which lay abandoned behind them.

If the atmosphere of the Elizabethan Age still may be found in the forgotten Cumberlands, let us lay claim to kinship with yonder roistering heroes of a gallant day; for this was ever the atmosphere of our own frontier. To feel again the following breezes of the Golden Hind, or see again, floating high in the cloudless skies, the sails of the Great Armada, was the privilege of Americans for a double decade within the memory of men yet living, in that country, so unfailingly beloved, which we call the Old West of America.

Excerpted from the book The Passing of the Frontier, A Chronicle of the Old West, 
by Emerson Hough, Yale University Press, 1918. (now in the public domain)

The book covers the period from the end of the colonial days to the clipper ships. The story of American ships and sailors is an epic of blue water which seems singularly remote, almost unreal, to the later generations. Vanished fleets and brave memories-a chronicle of America which had written its closing chapters before the Civil War! There will be other Yankee merchantmen in times to come, but never days like those when skippers sailed on seas uncharted in quest of ports mysterious and unknown.

Ralph D. Paine was an American author of many maritime books and a friend of Stephen Crane, author of The Red Badge of Courage.

eText Edition
 

OTHER
Anti-Slavery Leaders of North Carolina eText

BIOGRAPHY
Born Sept. 10, 1867, Tarboro, N.C.
Died Jan. 27, 1928, Washington, D.C.
John Spencer Bassett was born in rural eastern North Carolina in 1867 amid the poverty of a defeated South. His devoutly Methodist parents sent him to their church's college, Trinity, in 1886 from which he graduated with a degree in history. He began teaching in Durham public schools before heading north to Johns Hopkins University to earn a Ph. D. degree. He returned to Trinity after it relocated to Durham. He was a very popular teacher who had the willingness to work hard and the discipline to balance his teaching and concern for students with his primary love of research and writing.  Believing that everyone could collect, if not write, his ulterior motive was to acquire a body of materials for historical research. Students, administrators, and alumni combed their attics donating Confederate money, Indian relics, travel souvenirs, and political memorabilia as well as volumes of books, pamphlets, religious and secular newspapers, maps, and manuscripts. After a few years Bassett proudly reported to Adams that over 2,000 documents had been collected for use in primary research. Soon "manager of the library" was added to his varied duties. Seeking a wider audience than a single college campus, he successfully launched a journal of thought and action, The South Atlantic Quarterly, in 1902. An editorial in that journal and the resulting clamor for his dismissal from the college faculty by Democratic political leaders in the state. He left Trinity College in 1906 ~ Excerpted from the Duke University Archives

Duke University Biography
University of North Carolina Press Biography

Opening Line: "SHADOWS . . . they loom behind every king and queen, every prince and princess, every potentate, dictator and eminent personage..." 

Brust's ghost writer was Peter Cheyney, a very popular and prolific novelist and crime novelist. He had been badly wounded at the 2nd Battle of the Somme in WWI.

Cheyney Bibliography
 

BIOGRAPHY
Noel Coward was born in Teddington, Middlesex on 16 December 1899. A professional stage actor from the age of twelve, Coward later created a sensation as a playwright, with titles such as Hay Fever, The Vortex, Private Lives, Cavalcade, Blithe Spirit, and Design For Living. In the forties he was involved in film, with adaptations of Blithe Spirit and Brief Encounter, before starting a new career as a cabaret performer in the fifties. A celebrated wit and prodigious theatrical talent, Coward wrote over a hundred works in various different genres. He was knighted in 1970 and died three years later in Jamaica. 

Annotated Bibliography
British Drama Biography