Sir Henry Morton Stanley was a journalist and explorer famous for his exploration of Africa and his search for David Livingstone. Stanley travelled to Zanzibar and outfitted an expedition with the best of everything, requiring no fewer than...

Edward VII was King of the United Kingdom and the British Dominions and Emperor of India from 22 January 1901 until his death on 6 May 1910. He was the first British monarch of the House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, which was renamed the House of...

Pierre-Auguste Renoir was a French artist who was a leading painter in the development of the Impressionist style. As a celebrator of beauty, and especially feminine sensuality, it has been said that "Renoir is the final representative of a...

Georges Benjamin Clemenceau was a French statesman, physician and journalist. He served as the Prime Minister of France from 1906 to 1908, and again from 1916 to 1920. For nearly the final year of World War I he led France, and was one of t...

Johannes Hermann Zukertort was a leading Polish chess master. He was one of the leading world players for most of the 1870s and 1880s, and lost to Wilhelm Steinitz in the World Chess Championship 1886, generally regarded as the first World...

Mary MacKillop also known as Saint Mary of the Cross, was an Australian Roman Catholic nun who, together with Father Julian Tenison Woods, founded the Sisters of St Joseph of the Sacred Heart and a number of schools and welfare institutions...

Karl Friedrich May was a popular German writer, noted mainly for adventure novels set in the American Old West, (best known for the characters of Winnetou and Old Shatterhand) and similar books set in the Orient and Middle East (with Kara B...

Abdul Hamid II was the 34th sultan of the Ottoman Empire. He oversaw a period of decline in the power and extent of the Empire, ruling from 31 August 1876 until he was deposed on 27 April 1909. Abdülhamid II was the last Ottoman Sultan to r...

John William Strutt, 3rd Baron Rayleigh, was a British scientist who made extensive contributions to both theoretical and experimental physics. He spent all of his academic career at the University of Cambridge. Among many honours, he recei...

Sir James Dewar was a Scottish chemist and physicist. He is probably best-known today for his invention of the Dewar flask, which he used in conjunction with extensive research into the liquefaction of gases. He was also particularly intere...

William McKinley, Jr. was the twenty-fifth President of the United States (1897-1901), and the last veteran of the American Civil War to be elected. By the 1880s, this Ohio native was a nationally known Republican leader; his signature issu...

Edvard Hagerup Grieg was a Norwegian composer and pianist who composed in the romantic period. He is best known for his Piano Concerto in A minor, for his incidental music to Henrik Ibsen's play Peer Gynt (which includes In the Hall of the...

Robert Heinrich Hermann Koch was a German physician and microbiologist. As the founder of modern bacteriology, he identified the specific causative agents of tuberculosis, cholera, and anthrax and gave experimental support for the concept o...

Baroness Bertha von Suttner, Gräfin (Countess) Kinsky von Wchinitz und Tettau was an Austrian novelist, radical (organizational) pacifist, and the first woman to be a Nobel Peace Prize laureate. Suttner became a leading figure in the pea...

The Three Musketeers is the most famous of Alexandre Dumas’s historical novels and one of the most popular adventure novels ever written. Dumas’s swashbuckling epic chronicles the adventures of d’Artagnan, a brash young man from the country...