Jean-Antoine Watteau commonly referred to as Antoine Watteau, was a French painter whose brief career spurred the revival of interest in colour and movement, as seen in the tradition of Correggio and Rubens. He revitalized the waning Baroqu...

Catherine I, the second wife of Peter I of Russia, reigned as Empress of Russia from 1725 until her death. The life of Catherine I was said by Voltaire to be nearly as extraordinary as that of Peter the Great himself. There are no documents...

Edward Vernon ("Old Grog") was an English naval officer. His enduring claim to fame was his 1740 order that his sailors' rum should be diluted with water. In 1740, citrus juice (usually lemon or lime juice) was added to the recipe of the tr...

Griffith Jones was a minister of the Church of England famous for his work in organising circulating schools in Wales. His name is usually associated with that of Llanddowror, Carmarthenshire. Jones was an enthusiastic member of the Soci...

Charles VI was the penultimate Habsburg sovereign of the Habsburg Empire. He succeeded his elder brother, Joseph I, as Holy Roman Emperor, King of Bohemia, Croatia and Hungary, Archduke of Austria, etc., in 1711. He unsuccessfully claimed t...

Johann Sebastian Bach was a German composer, organist, harpsichordist, violist, and violinist whose sacred and secular works for choir, orchestra, and solo instruments drew together the strands of the Baroque period and brought it to its ul...

George Berkeley was one of the three most famous (Locke and Hume) eighteenth century British Empiricists. He is best known for his motto, esse is percipi, to be is to be perceived. He was an idealist: everything that exists is either a...

Italian composer and keyboard player. Son of the composer Alessandro Scarlatti, he worked as his father's assistant in Naples. By 1705 he was living in Rome. His father subsequently sent him to Venice, where he stayed until about 1708. Ther...

George Frideric Handel was a German Baroque composer who spent the bulk of his career in London, becoming famous for his operas, oratorios, anthems and organ concertos. Born in a family indifferent to music, Handel received critical trainin...

Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit, German physicist and instrument maker. He spent most of his life in the Netherlands, where he devoted himself to the study of physics and the manufacture of precision meteorological instruments. He is best known f...

Hans Poulsen Egede was a Dano-Norwegian Lutheran missionary who launched mission efforts to Greenland, which led him to be styled the Apostle of Greenland. He established a successful mission among the Inuit and is credited with revitalizin...

The Principia : Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy. In his monumental 1687 work Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, known familiarly as the Principia, Isaac Newton laid out in mathematical terms the principles of time,...

John William Friso became the titular Prince of Orange in 1702. He was stadtholder of Friesland until his death by drowning in the Hollands Diep in 1711. He was the son of Henry Casimir II, Prince of Nassau-Dietz, and Henriëtte Amalia van...

William Stukeley was an English antiquarian who pioneered the archaeological investigation of the prehistoric monuments of Stonehenge and Avebury, work for which he has been remembered as "probably... the most important of the early forerun...

The Glorious Revolution, also called the Revolution of 1688, was the overthrow of King James II of England (James VII of Scotland) by a union of English Parliamentarians with the Dutch stadtholder William III, Prince of Orange. William's su...