Wilhelm (later William) Steinitz was an Austrian and later American chess Master player, and the first undisputed world chess champion from 1886 to 1894. He was also a highly influential writer and chess theoretician. When discussing che...

Winslow Homer was an American landscape painter and printmaker, best known for his marine subjects. He is considered one of the foremost painters in 19th-century America and a preeminent figure in American art. Largely self-taught, Homer...

James Butler Hickok, known as "Wild Bill" Hickok, was a folk character of the American Old West. Some of his exploits as reported at the time were fictionalized, but his skills as a gunfighter and gambler provided the basis for his enduring...

Paul Charles Morphy was an American chess player. He is considered to have been the greatest chess master of his era and an unofficial World Chess Champion. He was a chess prodigy. He was called "The Pride and Sorrow of Chess" because he ha...

Sitting Bull, Hunkpapa Sioux Leader and Medicine Man, born about 1837. He was the principal chief of the Dakota Sioux, who were driven from their reservation in the Black Hills by miners in 1876, and took up arms against the whites and fri...

Elisabeth of Austria was the wife of Emperor Franz Joseph I, and thus Empress of Austria and Queen of Hungary. Born into Bavarian royalty, Elisabeth (Sisi) enjoyed an informal upbringing, before marrying Franz Joseph at 16. She was sudde...

Stephen Grover Cleveland was both the twenty-second and twenty-fourth President of the United States. Cleveland is the only President to serve two non-consecutive terms (1885–1889 and 1893–1897). He was the winner of the popular vote for Pr...

John Pierpont Morgan was an American financier, banker and art collector who dominated corporate finance and industrial consolidation during his time. In 1892 Morgan arranged the merger of Edison General Electric and Thompson-Houston Electr...

Abraham Kuijper generally known as Abraham Kuyper, was a Dutch politician, journalist, statesman and theologian. He founded the Anti-Revolutionary Party and was prime minister of the Netherlands between 1901 and 1905....

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...