Karl Wilhelm Friedrich (later: von) Schlegel was a German poet, critic and scholar. He was the younger brother of August Wilhelm Schlegel. Of the two brothers, Friedrich was unquestionably the more original genius. He was the real founder o...

Raja Ram Mohan Roy was a founder (with Dwarkanath Tagore and other Bengali Brahmins) of the Brahmo Samaj in 1828 which engendered the Brahmo Samaj, an influential Indian socio-religious reform movement. His influence was apparent in the fie...

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was an English poet, literary critic, philosopher and theologian who, with his friend William Wordsworth, was a founder of the Romantic Movement in England and a member of the Lake Poets. He wrote the poems The Rime...

William I Frederick, born Willem Frederik Prins van Oranje-Nassau, was a Prince of Orange and the first King of the Netherlands and Grand Duke of Luxembourg. In Germany, he was ruler (as Fürst) of the Principality of Nassau-Orange-Fulda fro...

Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire was a French naturalist who established the principle of "unity of composition". He was a colleague of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and expanded and defended Lamarck's evolutionary theories. Geoffroy's scientific vie...

The Boston Tea Party was a direct action by colonists in Boston, a town in the British colony of Massachusetts, against the British government and the monopolistic East India Company that controlled all the tea coming into the colonies. On...

William Henry Harrison, 9th President of the United States (1841) served the shortest time of any American President - only thirty-two days. He also was the first President from the Whig Party. He had won his nickname, "Old Tip," as the tou...

Louis Philippe I was King of the French from 1830 to 1848 as the leader of the Orléanist party. As a member of the cadet branch of the Royal House of France and a cousin of King Louis XVI of France by reason of his descent from their common...

Sir George Cayley, 6th Baronet was a prolific English engineer and one of the most important people in the history of aeronautics. Many consider him the first true scientific aerial investigator and the first person to understand the underl...

Robert Brown, Scottish botanist and botanical explorer. In 1801 he went as a naturalist on one of Matthew Flinders's expeditions to Australia, returning (1805) to England with valuable collections. In his Prodromus florae Novae Hollandiae e...

Prince Klemens Wenzel von Metternich was a German-born Austrian politician and statesman and was one of the most important diplomats of his era. He served as the Foreign Minister of the Holy Roman Empire and its successor state, the Austria...

Goethe's morbid tale of a man madly in love is purely emotional and beautifully unrestricted. some call it over-exaggeration but when reading the book one must understand when goethe wrote it he wasn't trying to be subtle. the book, written...

Meriwether Lewis was an American explorer, soldier, and public administrator, best known for his role as the leader of the Lewis and Clark Expedition also known as the Corps of Discovery, with William Clark, whose mission was to explore the...

Rear-Admiral Sir Francis Beaufort, was a hydrographer and officer in Britain's Royal Navy. Beaufort was the creator of the Beaufort scale for indicating wind force. Sir Francis Beaufort's father, Daniel Augustus Beaufort, was a Protestant c...

The American Revolution was a colonial revolt that took place between 1765 and 1783. The American Patriots in the Thirteen Colonies won independence from Great Britain, becoming the United States of America. In alliance with France and othe...