William McKinley, Jr. was the twenty-fifth President of the United States (1897-1901), and the last veteran of the American Civil War to be elected. By the 1880s, this Ohio native was a nationally known Republican leader; his signature issu...

Edvard Hagerup Grieg was a Norwegian composer and pianist who composed in the romantic period. He is best known for his Piano Concerto in A minor, for his incidental music to Henrik Ibsen's play Peer Gynt (which includes In the Hall of the...

Robert Heinrich Hermann Koch was a German physician and microbiologist. As the founder of modern bacteriology, he identified the specific causative agents of tuberculosis, cholera, and anthrax and gave experimental support for the concept o...

Baroness Bertha von Suttner, Gräfin (Countess) Kinsky von Wchinitz und Tettau was an Austrian novelist, radical (organizational) pacifist, and the first woman to be a Nobel Peace Prize laureate. Suttner became a leading figure in the pea...

The Three Musketeers is the most famous of Alexandre Dumas’s historical novels and one of the most popular adventure novels ever written. Dumas’s swashbuckling epic chronicles the adventures of d’Artagnan, a brash young man from the country...

The Count of Monte Cristo is one of the greatest novels of all time and in fact stands at the fountainhead of the entire stream of popular adventure-fiction. Dumas himself was one of the founders of the genre. The cold, brooding, vampiric C...

Bernadette Soubirous was the firstborn daughter of a miller from Lourdes (Lorda in Occitan), France, and is venerated as a saint in the Catholic Church. Soubirous is best known for the Marian apparitions of a "young lady" who asked for a...

Muhammad Ahmad bin Abd Allah was a religious leader of the Samaniyya order in Sudan who, on June 29, 1881, proclaimed himself as the Mahdi or messianic redeemer of the Islamic faith. From his announcement of the Mahdiyya in June 1881 until...

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was a German philologist, philosopher, cultural critic, poet and composer. He wrote several critical texts on religion, morality, contemporary culture, philosophy and science, displaying a fondness for metaphor,...

Ludwig Eduard Boltzmann was an Austrian physicist famous for his founding contributions in the fields of statistical mechanics and statistical thermodynamics. He was one of the most important advocates for atomic theory at a time when that...

Nikolai Andreyevich Rimsky-Korsakov was a Russian composer, one of five Russian composers known as The Five, and was later a teacher of harmony and orchestration. Mainly known for his symphonic works, especially the popular symphonic suite...

Henri Rousseau was a French Post-Impressionist painter in the Naïve or Primitive manner. He was also known as Le Douanier (the customs officer), a humorous description of his occupation as a toll collector. Ridiculed during his lifetime, he...

Henry John Heinz was an American entrepreneur who, at the age of 25, co-founded a small horseradish concern in Sharpsburg, Pennsylvania. This business failed, but his second business expanded into tomato ketchup and other condiments, and ul...

Karl Friedrich Benz was a German engine designer and automobile engineer, generally regarded as the inventor of the gasoline-powered automobile. Other German contemporaries, Gottlieb Daimler and Wilhelm Maybach, also worked independently on...

In Ireland, the Great Famine was a period of mass starvation, disease and emigration between 1845 and 1852. It is also known, mostly outside Ireland, as the Irish Potato Famine. In the Irish language it is called an Gorta Mór, meaning "the...