Paul I was the Emperor of Russia between 1796 and 1801. Paul was born in the Palace of Empress Elisabeth in St Petersburg. He was the son of Elizabeth's heir, her nephew, the Grand Duke Peter, later Emperor Peter III, and his wife, the Gran...

Vice-Admiral William Bligh FRS RN was an officer of the British Royal Navy and a colonial administrator. A notorious mutiny occurred during his command of HMS Bounty in 1789; Bligh and his loyal men made a remarkable voyage to Timor, after...

Joseph Louis Proust was a French chemist. Proust’s largest accomplishment into the realm of science was disproving Berthollet with the law of definite proportions, which is sometimes also known as Proust's Law. Proust studied copper carbona...

Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, Prince de Benevente, the Prince of Diplomats, was a French diplomat. He worked successfully from the regime of Louis XVI, through the French Revolution and then under Napoleon I, Louis XVIII and Louis...

The 1755 Lisbon earthquake, also known as the Great Lisbon Earthquake, took place on November 1, 1755, at around 9:40 in the morning. The earthquake was followed by a tsunami and fires, which caused near-total destruction of Lisbon in Portu...

Marie Antoinette was Queen Consort of France. Daughter of Empress Maria Theresa of Austria of the Habsburg dynasty and her consort, the Emperor Francis I, she was married to the heir to the French throne (later Louis XVI of France) in order...

Alexander Hamilton was a Founding Father, soldier, economist, political philosopher, one of America's first constitutional lawyers and the first United States Secretary of the Treasury. As Secretary of the Treasury, Hamilton was the prim...

Nicolas-Jacques Conté was a French painter, balloonist, army officer, and inventor of the modern pencil. He distinguished himself for his mechanical genius which was of great avail to the French army in Egypt. Napoleon called him “a univ...

Louis XVIII was King of France and Navarre from 1814 to 1824, omitting the Hundred Days in 1815. Louis XVIII spent twenty-three years in exile, from 1791 to 1814, due to the French Revolution, and was exiled again in 1815, upon the return o...

James Parkinson FGS was an English surgeon, apothecary, geologist, palaeontologist and political activist. He is best known for his 1817 work An Essay on the Shaking Palsy, in which he was the first to describe "paralysis agitans", a condit...

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was a prolific and influential composer of the Classical era. Born in Salzburg, Mozart showed prodigious ability from his earliest childhood. Already competent on keyboard and violin, he composed from the age of five...

José Gaspar, also known by his nickname Gasparilla (supposedly lived c. 1756 – 1821), is an apocryphal Spanish pirate, the "Last of the Buccaneers," who is claimed to have roamed and plundered across the Gulf of Mexico and the Spanish Main...

Willem Bilderdijk was a Dutch poet. His parents were ardent partisans of the House of Orange-Nassau, and Bilderdijk grew up with strong monarchical and Calvinistic convictions. After studying at Leiden University, Bilderdijk obtained his do...

William Godwin was an English journalist, political philosopher and novelist. He is considered one of the first exponents of utilitarianism, and the first modern proponent of anarchism. Godwin is most famous for two books that he published...

Principal Writings on Religion Including Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion and the Natural History of Religion. David Hume is one of the most provocative philosophers to have written in the English language. His skeptical accounts of th...