In 1860–61, Robert O'Hara Burke and William John Wills led an expedition of 19 men with the intention of crossing Australia from Melbourne in the south to the Gulf of Carpentaria in the north, a distance of around 3,250 kilometres (approxim...

Anton Chekhov wrote both plays and short stories. He is generally listed in the first rank of Russian playwrights and in the high second rank (a notch below Pushkin and Tolstoy) as a writer of prose. His most famous plays include The Seagul...

Theodor Herzl, also known in Hebrew as Khozeh HaMedinah, lit. "Visionary of the State", was an Austro-Hungarian journalist and writer. He is the father of modern political Zionism and in effect the foundation of the State of Israel....

Gustav Mahler was an Austrian late-Romantic composer, and one of the leading conductors of his generation. As a composer he acted as a bridge between the 19th century Austro-German tradition and the modernism of the early 20th century. Whil...

Sir James Matthew Barrie, 1st Baronet, OM, more commonly known as J. M. Barrie, was a Scottish novelist and dramatist. He is best remembered for creating Peter Pan, the boy who refused to grow up, whom he based on his friends, the Llewelyn...

Douglas Ross Hyde was an Irish academic, linguist, scholar of the Irish language, politician and diplomat who served as the first President of Ireland from June 1938 to June 1945. He was a leading figure in the Gaelic revival, and the first...

In what may be Dickens’s best novel, humble, orphaned Pip is apprenticed to the dirty work of the forge but dares to dream of becoming a gentleman—and one day, under sudden and enigmatic circumstances, he finds himself in possession of “gre...

The American Civil War, widely known as simply the Civil War in the United States as well as other sectional names, was fought from 1861 to 1865. Seven Southern slave states individually declared their secession from the United States a...

José Rizal was a Filipino polymath, patriot and the most prominent advocate for reform in the Philippines during the Spanish colonial era. He is regarded as the foremost Filipino patriot and is listed as one of the national heroes of the Ph...

Rudolf Steiner was an Austrian philosopher, literary scholar, architect, playwright, educator, and social thinker. He is the founder of anthroposophy, "a movement based on the notion that there is a spiritual world comprehensible to pure th...

Mehmet VI was the 36th and last Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, reigning from 1918 to 1922. The brother of Mehmed V, he succeeded to the throne as the eldest male member of the House of Osman after the 1916 suicide of Abdülaziz's son Yusuf Iz...

Field Marshal Edmund Henry Hynman Allenby, 1st Viscount Allenby GCB, GCMG, GCVO was a British soldier and administrator most famous for his role during the First World War, in which he led the Egyptian Expeditionary Force in the conquest of...

Georges Méliès was a French filmmaker famous for leading many technical and narrative developments in the earliest cinema. He was very innovative in the use of special effects. He accidentally discovered the stop trick, or substitution, in...

Aristide Joseph Bonaventure Maillol was a French Catalan sculptor, painter, and printmaker. The subject of nearly all of Maillol's mature work is the female body, treated with a classical emphasis on stable forms. The figurative style of hi...

The Kingdom of Italy was a state founded in 1861 when King Victor Emmanuel II of Sardinia was proclaimed King of Italy. The state was founded as a result of the unification of Italy under the influence of the Kingdom of Sardinia, which was...