The Eiffel Tower is a wrought-iron lattice tower on the Champ de Mars in Paris, France. It is named after the engineer Gustave Eiffel, whose company designed and built the tower. Constructed from 1887 to 1889 as the entrance to the 1889...

Li Dazhao was a Chinese intellectual who co-founded the Communist Party of China with Chen Duxiu and other early communists in 1921. Li was a nationalist and believed that the peasantry in China were to play an important role in China's...

Karel Doorman was a Dutch Rear Admiral who commanded ABDACOM Naval forces, a hastily-organized multinational naval force formed to defend the East Indies against an overwhelming Imperial Japanese attack. Doorman was killed and the main body...

Adolf Hitler was an Austrian-born German politician and the leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party (German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, abbreviated NSDAP), commonly known as the Nazi Party. He was Chancell...

Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein was an Austrian-British philosopher who worked primarily in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language. From 1929–1947, Wittgenstein taught at the University...

Edwin Powell Hubble was an American astronomer who played a crucial role in establishing the field of extragalactic astronomy and is generally regarded as one of the most important observational cosmologists of the 20th century. Hubble is k...

Jawaharlal Nehru was the first, and is so far the longest-serving, prime minister of independent India, serving from 1947 to 1964. A leading figure in the Indian independence movement, Nehru was elected by the Congress party to assume offic...

Martin Heidegger was a German philosopher and a seminal thinker in the Continental tradition and philosophical hermeneutics. According to the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, he is "widely acknowledged to be one of the most original and...

Sir Charles Spencer Chaplin, KBE (16 April 1889 – 25 December 1977) was an English comic actor, filmmaker, and composer who rose to fame in the era of silent film. Chaplin became a worldwide icon through his screen persona "the Tramp" and i...

Abel Gance was a French film director and producer, writer and actor. He is best known for three major silent films: J'accuse, La Roue, and the monumental Napoléon. He worked in the cinema from 1909, finally winning acclaim with Mater do...

The Wounded Knee Massacre was the last major armed conflict between the Lakota Sioux and the US. After the death of Sitting Bull, a band of Sioux, led by Big Foot, fled into the badlands, where they were captured by the 7th Cavalry on Dec....

Howard Phillips Lovecraft — known as H. P. Lovecraft — was an American author of horror, fantasy, poetry and science fiction, especially the subgenre known as weird fiction. Lovecraft's guiding aesthetic and philosophical principle was w...

Anton Herman Gerard 'Anthony' Fokker was born in Kediri (Dutch East Indies, now Indonesia) and became a Dutch aircraft manufacturer. At age 20 Fokker created his first plane — the Spin (Spider) — in 1910. In his own country he became a cele...

Vaslav Nijinsky was a Russian ballet dancer and choreographer of Polish descent. He grew to be celebrated for his virtuosity and for the depth and intensity of his characterizations. He could perform en pointe, a rare skill among male danc...

Boris Pasternak was a Soviet Russian poet, novelist, and literary translator. In his native Russian, Pasternak's first book of poems, My Sister, Life (1917), is one of the most influential collections ever published in the Russian language....