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,...

The Louisiana Purchase was the acquisition by the United States of America in 1803 of 828,000 square miles (2,144,000 square kilometers or 529,920,000 acres) of France's claim to the territory of Louisiana. The U.S. paid 50 million francs (...

Christian Andreas Doppler was an Austrian mathematician and physicist. He is celebrated for his principle — known as the Doppler effect — that the observed frequency of a wave depends on the relative speed of the source and the observer. He...

Robert Stephenson was an English civil engineer. He was the only son of George Stephenson, the famed locomotive builder and railway engineer; many of the achievements popularly credited to his father were actually the joint efforts of fathe...

James, Rajah of Sarawak was a British adventurer whose exploits in the Malay Archipelago made him the first White Rajah of Sarawak. Born in India and briefly educated in England, he served in the Bengal Army, was wounded, and resigned hi...

Louis-Hector Berlioz was a French Romantic composer, best known for his compositions Symphonie fantastique, Grande messe des morts (Requiem), Les Troyens, and La damnation de Faust. Berlioz made significant contributions to the modern orche...

Justus Freiherr von Liebig was a German chemist who made major contributions to agricultural and biological chemistry, and worked on the organization of organic chemistry. As a professor, he devised the modern laboratory-oriented teaching m...

Philosopher and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson was founder of transcendentalism, Emerson believed in the power of intuition over scientific reason and in the strength of nature and the human spirit. In one of his best-known essays, "Self Reliance...

The Lewis and Clark Expedition, also known as the Corps of Discovery Expedition, was the first American expedition to cross what is now the western portion of the United States, departing in May, 1804 from near St. Louis on the Mississippi...

Johann Strauss I was a Austrian violinist and composer of waltzes and other works, notably Redetzky March (1848). His son Johann (1825–1899), known as “the Younger,” is sometimes called “the Waltz King” and is best remembered for his nu...

Mikhail Ivanovich Glinka was the first Russian composer to gain wide recognition within his own country, and is often regarded as the father of Russian classical music. Glinka's compositions were an important influence on future Russian com...

Nathaniel Hawthorne was an American novelist and short story writer. Nathaniel Hathorne was born in 1804 in the city of Salem. His ancestors include John Hathorne, a judge during the Salem Witch Trials. Nathaniel later added a "w" to make h...

Franklin Pierce, the 14th President of the United States (1853-1857), came to office during a period of growing tension between the North and South. A politician of limited ability, Pierce was behind one of the most crucial pieces of legisl...