RMS Titanic was the second of a trio of superliners intended to dominate the transatlantic travel business. Owned by the White Star Line and built at the Harland and Wolff shipyard in Belfast, Ireland, the Titanic was the largest passenger...

Alan Mathison Turing OBE FRS was an English mathematician, computer scientist, logician, cryptanalyst, philosopher, and theoretical biologist. Turing was highly influential in the development of theoretical computer science, providing a for...

Wernher von Braun was a German, later American, aerospace engineer, and space architect. He was the leading figure in the development of rocket technology in Germany and the father of rocket technology and space science in the United States...

Lawrence Durrell was born in India in 1912. His books include The Alexandria Quartet, Bitter Lemons, Reflections on a Marine Venus and The Dark Labyrinth. He died in France in 1990....

John Milton Cage was an American experimental music composer, writer and visual artist. He is most widely known for his 1952 composition 4'33", whose three movements are performed without playing a single note. Cage was an early composer of...

Major General John Dutton was a British airborne officer best known for being the leader of the small group of airborne forces that actually got to Arnhem bridge during the Battle of Arnhem. He was one of the first to join the newly formed...

Kim Il-sung was the leader of North Korea from its founding in 1948 until his death, when he was succeeded by his son Kim Jong-il. He held the posts of Prime Minister from 1948 to 1972 and President from 1972 to his death, in addition to Ge...

Milton Friedman is the twentieth century's most prominent economist advocate of free markets. He was born in 1912 to Jewish immigrants in New York City. He attended Rutgers University, where he received his B.A. at the age of twenty, then w...

On December 3, 1938, Picture Post introduced "The Greatest War Photographer in the World: Robert Capa" with a spread of 26 photographs taken during the Spanish Civil War at the battle of Ebro. The "greatest war photographer" hated war. H...

Jesse Owens was an African American track-and-field star famous for his performance at the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin. Before the eyes of the Nazi leadership, who had hoped to use the games as a source of propaganda for Aryan nationalism,...

Richard Milhous Nixon, 37th President of the United States (1969-1974), was the first and (so far) the only President of the United States to resign the office. Before the spectacular fall, there was an equally spectacular rise. John F....

Rosa Louise McCauley Parks was an African American civil rights activist whom the U.S. Congress later called the "Mother of the Modern-Day Civil Rights Movement." On December 1, 1955 in Montgomery, Alabama, Parks, age 42, refused to obey...

Gerald R. Ford, 38th President of the United States (1974-1977), became President of the United States on August 9, 1974, under extraordinary circumstances. Owing to the Watergate scandal, Ford's predecessor, Richard Nixon, had resigned und...

By August 15, 1914 the Panama Canal was officially opened by the passing of the SS Ancon. At the time, no single effort in American history had exacted such a price in dollars or in human life. The American expenditures fr...

World War I started with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austria- Hungarian throne, in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914 by a member of the Black Hand, a Serbian nationalist secret society. Austria-Hungary's reaction...