Ivanhoe was the first of Scott's novels to take place in the middle ages but it is far from being the fantastic, medievalist romance associated (in the critical imagination) with a visionary Britain that never was. This is the first novel i...

A short story by Washington Irving, Rip Van Winkle tells the tale of a lazy old man who falls asleep for twenty years and returns to his village to find that the world has changed drastically during his absence and that nearly everyone he k...

Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, later The Prince Consort was the husband of Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. He was born in the Saxon duchy of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld to a family connected to many o...

Léon Foucault was a French physicist best known for the invention of the Foucault pendulum, a device demonstrating the effect of the Earth's rotation. He also made an early measurement of the speed of light, invented the gyroscope, and disc...

Roger Fenton was a pioneering British photographer, one of the first war photographers and known for his Crimean War photographs. It is likely that in autumn 1854, as the war grabbed the attention of the British public, that some powerfu...

Carlos Manuel de Céspedes del Castillo was a Cuban planter who freed his slaves and made the declaration of Cuban independence in 1868 which started the Ten Years' War. Céspedes was a landowner and lawyer in eastern Cuba, near Bayamo, wh...

Jean Désiré Gustave Courbet was a French painter who led the Realist movement in 19th-century French painting. The Realist movement bridged the Romantic movement (characterized by the paintings of Théodore Géricault and Eugène Delacroix), w...

Jacques Offenbach is best known for his opera Les contes d'Hoffman (Tales of Hoffmann) and for a work he did not compose, Gaîté parisienne, which used his themes as assembled and arranged by Manuel Rosenthal. Offenbach was one of those popu...

Samuel Brannan was an American settler, businessman, journalist, and prominent Mormon who founded the California Star, the first newspaper in San Francisco, California. He is considered the first to publicize the California Gold Rush and wa...

Herman Melville was an American novelist, short story writer, and poet of the American Renaissance period. His best known works include Typee (1846), a romantic account of his experiences in Polynesian life, and his whaling novel Moby-Dick...

Johan Barthold Jongkind was a Dutch painter and printmaker. He painted marine landscapes in a free manner and is regarded as a forerunner of Impressionism. Jongkind's most frequent subject was the marine landscape, which he painted both...

John Adams was an English mathematician and astronomer who predicted the existence of Neptune. While a student at Cambridge he wrote this note (found only after his death) dated Jul. 3, 1841: Formed a design at the beginning of this week of...

Cyrus West Field was an American businessman and financier who led the Atlantic Telegraph Company, the company that successfully laid the first telegraph cable across the Atlantic Ocean in 1858. The cable broke down three weeks afterwar...

John Ruskin was an English author, poet and artist, although more famous for his work as art critic and social critic. Ruskin's thinking on art and architecture became the thinking of the Victorian and Edwardian eras. In 1878 he wrote a...

Victoria was the daughter of Edward, the Duke of Kent and Princess Victoria of Saxe-Coburg. She was born in Kensington Palace in London on May 24th, 1819. In 1837 Queen Victoria took the throne after the death of her uncle William IV. Due t...