Jacques Offenbach is best known for his opera Les contes d'Hoffman (Tales of Hoffmann) and for a work he did not compose, Gaîté parisienne, which used his themes as assembled and arranged by Manuel Rosenthal. Offenbach was one of those popu...

Samuel Brannan was an American settler, businessman, journalist, and prominent Mormon who founded the California Star, the first newspaper in San Francisco, California. He is considered the first to publicize the California Gold Rush and wa...

Herman Melville was an American novelist, short story writer, and poet of the American Renaissance period. His best known works include Typee (1846), a romantic account of his experiences in Polynesian life, and his whaling novel Moby-Dick...

Johan Barthold Jongkind was a Dutch painter and printmaker. He painted marine landscapes in a free manner and is regarded as a forerunner of Impressionism. Jongkind's most frequent subject was the marine landscape, which he painted both...

John Adams was an English mathematician and astronomer who predicted the existence of Neptune. While a student at Cambridge he wrote this note (found only after his death) dated Jul. 3, 1841: Formed a design at the beginning of this week of...

Cyrus West Field was an American businessman and financier who led the Atlantic Telegraph Company, the company that successfully laid the first telegraph cable across the Atlantic Ocean in 1858. The cable broke down three weeks afterwar...

John Ruskin was an English author, poet and artist, although more famous for his work as art critic and social critic. Ruskin's thinking on art and architecture became the thinking of the Victorian and Edwardian eras. In 1878 he wrote a...

Victoria was the daughter of Edward, the Duke of Kent and Princess Victoria of Saxe-Coburg. She was born in Kensington Palace in London on May 24th, 1819. In 1837 Queen Victoria took the throne after the death of her uncle William IV. Due t...

Sir George Gabriel Stokes, 1st Baronet, was an Anglo-Irish physicist and mathematician. Born in County Sligo, Ireland, Stokes spent all of his career at the University of Cambridge, where he was the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics from 18...

A short story by Washington Irving, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow tells the tale of Ichabod Crane a superstitious school-teacher who finds himself terrorized either by a headless phantom or his prank-loving rival for the affections of a local...

The Ecuadorian War of Independence was fought from 1820 to 1822 between several South American armies and Spain over control of the lands of the Royal Audience of Quito, a Spanish colonial administrative jurisdiction from which would eventu...

Robert O'Hara Burke was an Irish soldier and police officer, who achieved fame as an Australian explorer. He was the leader of the ill-fated Burke and Wills expedition, which was the first expedition to cross Australia from south to north,...

Victor Emmanuel II was the King of Piedmont, Savoy and Sardinia from 1849–1861. On February 18, 1861, he assumed the title as King of Italy to become the first king of a united Italy, a title he held till his death in 1878. The Italians gav...

Henri Vieuxtemps was a Belgian violinist and composer. He was a child prodigy and one of the most important composers of violin music in the latter-nineteenth century. He was an innovator within the Romantic movement, though he was not alwa...

Multatuli is the pseudonym of Eduard Douwes Dekker (1820-1887). After 18 years of civil service in the Dutch East Indies, he returned to Europe in 1856 a disillusioned man. The way the natives were treated by their own as well as by the Du...