Josiah Willard Gibbs was an American theoretical physicist, chemist, and mathematician. He devised much of the theoretical foundation for chemical thermodynamics as well as physical chemistry. As a mathematician, he invented vector analysis...

Paul Cézanne was a French artist and Post-Impressionist painter whose work laid the foundations of the transition from the 19th-century conception of artistic endeavor to a new and radically different world of art in the 20th century. Cézan...

Machado de Assis was a pioneer Brazilian novelist, poet, playwright and short story writer, widely regarded as the greatest writer of Brazilian literature. Nevertheless, Assis did not achieve widespread popularity outside Brazil during his...

John Davison Rockefeller, Sr. was an American industrialist who played a prominent role in the early oil industry with the founding of Standard Oil (ExxonMobil is the largest of its descendants). Over a forty-year period, Rockefeller built...

Crazy Horse was a Native American war leader of the Oglala Lakota. He took up arms against the U.S. Federal government to fight against encroachments on the territories and way of life of the Lakota people, including leading a war party at...

George Smith was a pioneering English Assyriologist who first discovered and translated the Epic of Gilgamesh, the oldest-known written work of literature. From his youth, he was fascinated with Assyrian culture and history. In his spare ti...

Hans Makart was a 19th century Austrian academic history painter, designer, and decorator; most well known for his influence on Gustav Klimt and other Austrian artists, but in his own era considered an important artist himself and was a cel...

Piotr Tchaikovsky, Russian composer, started piano studies at five and soon showed remarkable gifts. He began to compose at age ten, and soon after was sent to the School of Jurisprudence where he remained for nine years. Tchaikovsky joine...

Gall Lakota Phizí, was a battle leader of the Hunkpapa Lakota in the long war against the United States. He was one of the commanders in the Battle of Little Bighorn. Gall was said to receive his nickname after eating the gall of an animal...

Émile Zola was a French novelist, playwright, journalist, the best-known practitioner of the literary school of naturalism, and an important contributor to the development of theatrical naturalism. He was a major figure in the political lib...

Auguste-René Rodin, French sculptor and draughtsman. He is the only sculptor of the modern age regarded in his lifetime and afterwards to be on a par with Michelangelo. Both made images with widespread popular appeal, and both stressed the...

Oscar-Claude Monet was a founder of French Impressionist painting, and the most consistent and prolific practitioner of the movement's philosophy of expressing one's perceptions before nature, especially as applied to plein-air landscape pa...

Oliver Twist is a classic tale of a boy of unknown parentage born in a workhouse and brought up under the cruel conditions to which pauper children were exposed in the Victorian England. With this novel, Dickens did not merely write a topic...

Emmanuel Chabrier was a French Romantic composer and pianist. Although known primarily for two of his orchestral works, España and Joyeuse marche, he left an important corpus of operas (including the increasingly popular L'étoile), songs, a...

Antonin Dvorak was the greatest Bohemian composer and one of the leading masters of symphonic and chamber music of the late 19th century. Dvorak displayed unusual musical talent at an early age and learned to play the violin from the local...