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...

Sir George Biddell Airy was an English mathematician and astronomer, Astronomer Royal from 1835 to 1881. His many achievements include work on planetary orbits, measuring the mean density of the Earth, a method of solution of two-dimensiona...

Jan van Speijk, also written Van Speyk, was a Dutch naval lieutenant who became a hero to the Dutch people for his efforts in suppressing the Belgian Revolution. When the Belgian War of Independence broke out Van Speijk gained an appointmen...

Alexandre Dumas was a French writer. His works have been translated into nearly 100 languages, and he is one of the most widely read French authors. Many of his historical novels of high adventure were originally published as serials, inclu...

Victor Marie Hugo was a French poet, novelist, and dramatist of the Romantic movement. Hugo is considered to be one of the greatest and best-known French writers. Outside of France, his most famous works are the novels Les Misérables, 1862,...