Pompey (the Great), was a distinguished and ambitious Roman military leader, provincial administrator and politician of the 1st century BC, the period of the Late Republic. Hailing from an Italian provincial background, Pompey first disting...

Blasco Núñez Vela y Villalba, first viceroy of Peru (1544-46). Sent to replace Vaca de Castro and to enforce the New Laws of Bartolomé de Las Casas, he had a violent, short career. He antagonized all in command and either ordered a murder o...

Jacob Bernoulli was one of the many prominent mathematicians in the Bernoulli family. He was an early proponent of Leibnizian calculus and had sided with Leibniz during the Leibniz–Newton calculus controversy. He is known for his numerous c...

As a brilliant, undisciplined, and unconventional thinker, Jean-Jacques Rousseau spent most of his life being driven by controversy back and forth between Paris and his native Geneva. Rousseau first attracted wide-spread attention with his...

William Booth was an English Methodist preacher who founded The Salvation Army and became its first General (1878–1912). The Christian movement with a quasi-military structure and government founded in 1865 has spread from London, England,...