Verify
Sources
Every public study note that teaches outside knowledge cites at least one of these 41 sources — checked against the live page before it was marked verified. The full text itself is from Standard Ebooks.
History of the American Whale Fishery
1878 Washington publication, detached from the Report of the Commissioner of Fish and Fisheries for 1875-1876, useful for American whaling history.
Aladdin or The Wonderful Lamp
Public-domain literary support for Aladdin's lamp allusions.
Book of Jonah, King James Version
Focused scriptural lead for Father Mapple's sermon and later Jonah allusions.
Greek fire
Reference support for Greek fire as a historical incendiary weapon.
Basilosaurus
Reference support for Basilosaurus as an extinct primitive whale genus.
Phrenology
Reference support for phrenology, Gall, Spurzheim, and its later discrediting.
Partitions of Poland
Reference support for the three partitions of Poland by Russia, Prussia, and Austria.
Manifest Destiny
Reference support for 1840s United States territorial expansion: Texas annexation (1845) and the Mexican-American War.
Carthage (ancient city, Tunisia)
Reference support for Carthage as a Phoenician colony founded from Tyre.
Thirty Years' War
Reference support for the Thirty Years' War (1618-1648).
St. Thomas Becket
Reference support for Thomas Becket, archbishop murdered at Canterbury in 1170.
Thirty-nine Articles
Reference support for the Thirty-Nine Articles, doctrinal statement of the Church of England.
Quaker (Religious Society of Friends)
Reference support for the Quakers / Religious Society of Friends.
Socrates
Reference support for Socrates, the ancient Greek philosopher.
John Bunyan
Reference support for John Bunyan, author of The Pilgrim's Progress, jailed for unlicensed preaching.
Miguel de Cervantes
Reference support for Miguel de Cervantes, author of Don Quixote, wounded at Lepanto.
Andrew Jackson
Reference support for Andrew Jackson, 7th US President, risen from frontier poverty.
Carl Linnaeus
Reference support for Carl Linnaeus, founder of modern biological classification.
Holy Roman Empire
Reference support for the Holy Roman Empire and its prince-electors.
Pandects (Roman law)
Reference support for the Pandects (Digest) as part of Justinian's codification of Roman law.
Hannibal (Carthaginian general)
Reference support for Hannibal's 218 BCE crossing of the Alps with war elephants.
Samuel Johnson (English author and lexicographer)
Reference support for Samuel Johnson as lexicographer of A Dictionary of the English Language (1755).
Cicero on Damocles
Translation excerpt from Cicero's Tusculan Disputations 5.61 for the Damocles allusion.
Mother Carey's Chickens
Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable entry for Mother Carey's Chickens.
Asphaltites
Wikisource transcription of the Asphaltites entry from the Supplement to the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Editions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
Typee
Melville's earlier Pacific narrative, useful for reviewing travel-writing and colonial-contact contexts.
Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas
Melville's earlier Pacific narrative, useful for South Seas and empire context.
Paradise Lost
Public-domain epic; reference for Satan's rebellion and infernal imagery alluded to throughout Moby-Dick.
Peter I
Reference support for Peter the Great's practical study of shipbuilding and maritime reform.
North Atlantic Right Whale
Modern biological reference for right-whale contrast notes.
Sperm Whale
Modern biological reference for sperm whales and spermaceti context.
Two Years Before the Mast
Public-domain maritime memoir useful for shipboard labor, discipline, and forecastle context.
The Mystery of Ambergris
Modern explanatory source for ambergris and sperm-whale digestive context.
The Barrel Building
Official Heidelberg Castle page for the Great Heidelberg Tun in the Barrel Building.
The Natural History of the Sperm Whale
BHL record for Beale's 1839 London edition, The natural history of the sperm whale.
The Age of Fable
Public-domain mythology handbook useful for classical allusion review.
Population of the United States in 1860 (Eighth Census)
Official decennial census volume; tabulates population by condition (free and slave). The enslaved population was 3,953,760 in 1860.
The King James Version of the Bible
Reference text for biblical allusions such as Jonah, Job, Ahab, Rachel, and Leviathan.
Webster's Unabridged Dictionary
Public-domain dictionary useful for nineteenth-century vocabulary checks.
The Arctic Regions and the Northern Whale-Fishery
Project Gutenberg ebook for the 1849 Religious Tract Society edition, described there as an abridgement drawing on Scoresby's Arctic Regions and Whale-Fishery material.
The Complete Works of William Shakespeare
Allusion lead for tragedy, soliloquy, stage form, Lear, Macbeth, and Hamlet echoes.
Companion edition
Shakespeare: The Complete Works
Our companion edition, built the same way: the complete text with source-cited study notes. Moby-Dick's many Shakespearean echoes lead naturally to it.