The Count of Monte Cristo is one of the greatest novels of all time and in fact stands at the fountainhead of the entire stream of popular adventure-fiction. Dumas himself was one of the founders of the genre. The cold, brooding, vampiric C...

Bernadette Soubirous was the firstborn daughter of a miller from Lourdes (Lorda in Occitan), France, and is venerated as a saint in the Catholic Church. Soubirous is best known for the Marian apparitions of a "young lady" who asked for a...

Muhammad Ahmad bin Abd Allah was a religious leader of the Samaniyya order in Sudan who, on June 29, 1881, proclaimed himself as the Mahdi or messianic redeemer of the Islamic faith. From his announcement of the Mahdiyya in June 1881 until...

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was a German philologist, philosopher, cultural critic, poet and composer. He wrote several critical texts on religion, morality, contemporary culture, philosophy and science, displaying a fondness for metaphor,...

Ludwig Eduard Boltzmann was an Austrian physicist famous for his founding contributions in the fields of statistical mechanics and statistical thermodynamics. He was one of the most important advocates for atomic theory at a time when that...

Nikolai Andreyevich Rimsky-Korsakov was a Russian composer, one of five Russian composers known as The Five, and was later a teacher of harmony and orchestration. Mainly known for his symphonic works, especially the popular symphonic suite...

Henri Rousseau was a French Post-Impressionist painter in the Naïve or Primitive manner. He was also known as Le Douanier (the customs officer), a humorous description of his occupation as a toll collector. Ridiculed during his lifetime, he...

Henry John Heinz was an American entrepreneur who, at the age of 25, co-founded a small horseradish concern in Sharpsburg, Pennsylvania. This business failed, but his second business expanded into tomato ketchup and other condiments, and ul...

Karl Friedrich Benz was a German engine designer and automobile engineer, generally regarded as the inventor of the gasoline-powered automobile. Other German contemporaries, Gottlieb Daimler and Wilhelm Maybach, also worked independently on...

In Ireland, the Great Famine was a period of mass starvation, disease and emigration between 1845 and 1852. It is also known, mostly outside Ireland, as the Irish Potato Famine. In the Irish language it is called an Gorta Mór, meaning "the...

Ludwig II was king of Bavaria from 1864 until shortly before his death. He is sometimes referred to as the Swan King in English and der Märchenkönig (the Fairy tale King) in German. Ludwig is sometimes referred to as Mad King Ludwig, though...

Amadeo I was the only King of Spain from the House of Savoy. He was the second son of King Victor Emmanuel II of Italy and was known for most of his life as Duke of Aosta, but reigned briefly as King of Spain from 1870 to 1873. Granted the...

Alexander III was the Emperor of Russia from 1881 until his death in 1894. Alexander was the second son of Alexander II and Marie of Hesse and by Rhine. In natural disposition he bore little resemblance to his soft-hearted, liberal minded f...

Georg Cantor was a German mathematician. He created set theory, which has become a fundamental theory in mathematics. Cantor established the importance of one-to-one correspondence between the members of two sets, defined infinite and well-...

Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen was a German physicist, of the University of Würzburg, who, on November 8, 1895, produced and detected electromagnetic radiation in a wavelength range today known as x-rays or Röntgen Rays. Röntgen's discovery of x-ra...