Johannes Diderik van der Waals was a Dutch scientist and thermodynamicist famous for his work on the equation of state for gases and liquids which describe the relation between the pressure, volume, and temperature of fluids (gases and liq...

Frederick Hollyer's portraits offers us an exclusive glimpse into late-Victorian and Edwardian celebrity culture. His sitters ranged from HG Wells to the Nobel prize-winning discoverer of argon Lord Rayleigh, from Princess Louise to William...

John Wilkes Booth was an American stage actor who assassinated President Abraham Lincoln at Ford's Theatre, in Washington, D.C., on April 14, 1865. Booth was a member of the prominent 19th century Booth theatrical family from Maryland and,...

John King was an Irish soldier who achieved fame as an Australian explorer. He was the sole survivor of the four men from the ill-fated Burke and Wills expedition who reached the Gulf of Carpentaria. The expedition was the first to cross Au...

Georges Bizet, French composer. Son of a music teacher, he gained admission to the Paris Conservatoire at age 9, and at age 17 he wrote the precocious Symphony in C Major (1855). Intent on success on the operatic stage, he produced The Pear...

Georges Bizet was a French composer of the romantic era. Best known for his operas in a career cut short by his early death, Bizet achieved few successes before his final work, Carmen, which has become one of the most popular and frequently...

Duleep Singh and later in life nicknamed the Black Prince of Perthshire, was the last Maharaja of the Sikh Empire. He was the youngest son of the legendary "Lion of the Punjab" Maharaja Ranjit Singh and Maharani Jind Kaur, and came to power...

John Muir was a Scottish-American naturalist, author, and early advocate of preservation of wilderness in the United States. His letters, essays, and books telling of his adventures in nature, especially in the Sierra Nevada mountains of Ca...

Graf Ferdinand von Zeppelin, German army officer and airship inventor and builder. He entered the Prussian army in 1858 and served in the Seven Weeks War and in the Franco-Prussian War. He was an observer with the Union army during the Amer...

Edwin Abbott Abbott, English schoolmaster and theologian, is best known as the author of the mathematical satire and religious allegory Flatland (1884): A Romance of Many Dimensions which describes a two-dimensional world and explores the n...

The First Anglo-Chinese War (1839–42), known popularly as the First Opium War, was fought between the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and the Qing Dynasty of China, with the aim of securing economic benefits from trade in China....

The First Anglo-Afghan War (also known as Auckland's Folly) was fought between British East India Company and Afghanistan from 1839 to 1842, which resulted in the deaths of 4,500 British and Indian soldiers, plus 12,000 of their camp follow...

George Armstrong Custer was a United States Army officer and cavalry commander in the American Civil War and the Indian Wars. Raised in Michigan and Ohio, Custer was admitted to West Point in 1858, where he graduated last in his class. Howe...

Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky, one of the Russian composers known as the Five, was an innovator of Russian music. He strove to achieve a uniquely Russian musical identity, often in deliberate defiance of the established conventions of Western...

Nikolai Mikhaylovich Przhevalsky also transliterated Przewalski, was a Russian geographer of Polish origin and explorer of Central and Eastern Asia. Although he never reached his final goal, Lhasa in Tibet, he travelled through regions unk...