Dom Pedro I, nicknamed "the Liberator", was the founder and first ruler of the Empire of Brazil. As King Dom Pedro IV, he reigned briefly over Portugal, where he also became known as "the Liberator" as well as "the Soldier King". Born in Li...

Andries Wilhelmus Jacobus Pretorius was a leader of the Boers who was instrumental in the creation of the Transvaal Republic, as well as the earlier but short-lived Natalia Republic, in present-day South Africa. On 16 December 1838, Pret...

Ferdinand Victor Eugène Delacroix was the most important of the French Romantic painters. Delacroix's use of expressive brushstrokes and his study of the optical effects of colour profoundly shaped the work of the Impressionists, while his...

Johan Rudolf Thorbecke was one of the most important Dutch politicians. In 1848, he virtually singlehandedly drafted the revision of the Dutch constitution, giving fewer powers to the king, and more to the parliament. Thorbecke was born...

Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin was a Russian author of the Romantic era who is considered by many to be the greatest Russian poet and the founder of modern Russian literature. Pushkin pioneered the use of vernacular speech in his poems and p...

Honoré de Balzac was a French novelist and playwright. The novel sequence La Comédie Humaine, which presents a panorama of post-Napoleonic French life, is generally viewed as his magnum opus. Owing to his keen observation of detail and u...

Samuel George Morton was an American physician and natural scientist. Samuel George Morton is often thought of as the originator of "American School" ethnography, a school of thought in antebellum American science that claimed the differenc...

Frederick Catherwood was an English artist, architect and explorer, best remembered for his meticulously detailed drawings of the ruins of the Maya civilization. He explored Mesoamerica in the mid 19th century with writer John Lloyd Stephen...

Nat Turner's Rebellion (also known as the Southampton Insurrection) was a rebellion of enslaved Virginians that took place in Southampton County, Virginia, in August 1831, led by Nat Turner. The rebels killed between 55 and 65 people, at le...

John Brown was a white American abolitionist who believed armed insurrection was the only way to overthrow the institution of slavery in the United States. During the 1856 conflict in Kansas, Brown commanded forces at the Battle of Black Ja...

Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay, PC was a British historian and Whig politician. He wrote extensively as an essayist and reviewer; his books on British history were hailed as literary masterpieces. Macaulay held political o...

Charles Goodyear was the inventor of vulcanization, a process that makes rubber harder, less soluble, and more durable. It is at the heart of rubber compounding, which played a key role at the onset of the Industrial Revolution. Goodyear ob...

Born into desperate poverty at the dawn of the nineteenth century, Millard Fillmore, 13th US President (1850-1853), climbed to the highest office in the land -- and inherited a nation breaking into fragments over the question of slavery. De...

Bellini, Vincenzo, Italian opera composer. He acquired his musical training from his grandfather and father, and began composing religious and secular music in his childhood. His first opera, Adelson e Salvini, was successfully performed in...

Brigham Young was a leader in the Latter Day Saint movement and was the president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from 1847 until his death. Young was also the first governor of the Utah Territory. Young had a variety...