Boris Vasilievich Spassky is a Russian chess grandmaster. He was the tenth World Chess Champion, holding the title from 1969 to 1972. He is the oldest surviving former world champion. Spassky won the Soviet Chess Championship twice outri...

Bilbo Baggins is a hobbit who enjoys a comfortable, unambitious life, rarely travelling any further than his pantry or his cellar. But his contentment is disturbed when the wizard, Gandalf, and a company of dwarves arrive on his doorstep on...

LZ 129 Hindenburg was a German zeppelin. It and its sister-ship LZ 130 Graf Zeppelin II were the largest aircraft ever built. In its second year of service, it was destroyed by a fire while landing at Lakehurst Naval Air Station in Manchest...

“Guernica, the oldest town of the Basque provinces and the center of their cultural traditions, was almost completely destroyed by the rebels in an air attack yesterday afternoon. The bombing of the undefended town far behind the front line...

Scott began his feature film directing career with The Duellists, which brought him the Jury Prize at the 1978 Cannes Film Festival. His second film was the breakthrough hit Alien which won an Academy Award® for Special Effects. This was fo...

Philip Glass is an Academy Award-nominated American composer. His music is frequently described as minimalist, though he prefers the term theatre music. He is considered one of the most influential composers of the late-20th century and is...

The Golden Gate Bridge is a suspension bridge spanning the Golden Gate, the one-mile-wide (1.6 km) strait connecting San Francisco Bay and the Pacific Ocean. The structure links the U.S. city of San Francisco, California—the northern tip of...

Saddam Hussein was the fifth President of Iraq, serving in this capacity from 16 July 1979 until 9 April 2003. Saddam formally rose to power in 1979, although he had been the de facto head of Iraq for several years prior. He suppressed s...

The original radio broadcast of Orson Welles' famous radio adaptation of H. G. Wells' classic novel The War of the Worlds was performed by Mercury Theatre on the Air as a Halloween special on October 30, 1938. The live broadcast frightened...

Lynn Margulis was an American biologist and University Professor in the Department of Geosciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She developed a theory of the origin of eukaryotic organelles, and contributed to the endosymbioti...

Experimental novel by James Joyce. Extracts of the work appeared as Work in Progress from 1928 to 1937, and it was published in its entirety as Finnegans Wake in 1939. The book is, in one sense, the story of a publican in Chapelizod (near D...

World War II was a global war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. The vast majority of the world's countries - including all the great powers - eventually formed two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis. A state of total war emer...

Professor Dr. Muhammad Yunus is a Bangladeshi banker and economist. He is the developer and founder of the concept of microcredit, the extension of small loans to entrepreneurs too poor to qualify for traditional bank loans. Yunus is also t...

The Golden Globe Awards are given annually, during a formal ceremony and dinner, telecast to more than 150 countries worldwide, to recognize outstanding achievements in the entertainment industry, both domestic and foreign, and to focus wid...

The Katyn massacre, also known as the Katyn Forest massacre was a mass murder of thousands of Polish prisoners of war (primarily military officers), intellectuals, policemen, and other public servants by the Soviet NKVD, based on a proposal...