Cyrus II of Persia, commonly known as Cyrus the Great and also called Cyrus the Elder by the Greeks, was the founder of the Achaemenid Empire. Under his rule, the empire embraced all the previous civilized states of the ancient Near East, e...

Gaius Julius Caesar is remembered as one of history's greatest generals and a key ruler of the Roman empire. As a young man he rose through the administrative ranks of the Roman republic, accumulating power until he was elected consul in 59...

Jesus (c. 4 BC – AD 30 / 33), also referred to as Jesus of Nazareth and Jesus of Galilee, is the central figure of Christianity, whom the teachings of most Christian denominations hold to be the Son of God. Christianity regards Jesus as the...

Born to a noble family of Wessex, England, as Wynfrid or Wynfrith, Boniface (in Latin, Bonifatius) is known as the "Apostle of Germany" for his work in Christianizing that country. First a benedictine monk and then ordained as a pr...

Vasco Núñez de Balboa was a Spanish conquistador who founded the colony of Darién in Panama, the oldest extant European settlement in the mainland of the Americas. He crossed the Isthmus in search of gold, reaching the Pacific Ocean after a...

Francisco Pizarro was a Conquistador who seized the Inca empire for Spain. In 1510 he enrolled in an expedition of exploration in the New World, and three years later he joined Vasco Núñez de Balboa on the expedition that discovered the Pac...

Ferdinand Magellan was a Portuguese explorer who organised the Spanish expedition to the East Indies that resulted in the first circumnavigation of the Earth, completed by Juan Sebastián Elcano. He was born in a still disputed location i...

Atahualpa (in hispanicized spellings) or Atawallpa (Quechua) was the last Sapa Inca (sovereign emperor) of the Tawantinsuyu (the Inca Empire) before the Spanish conquest. Atahualpa became emperor when he defeated and executed his older half...

Henry Hudson was an English sea explorer and navigator in the early 17th century. Hudson made two attempts on behalf of English merchants to find a prospective Northeast Passage to Cathay (today's China) via a route above the Arctic Circle....

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...

World War I started with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austria- Hungarian throne, in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914 by a member of the Black Hand, a Serbian nationalist secret society. Austria-Hungary's reaction...

Emmett Louis Till was a 14-year-old African-American who was lynched in Mississippi in 1955, after a white woman said she was offended by him in her family's grocery store. The brutality of his murder and the fact that his killers were acqu...

George Perry Floyd Jr. was an African American man who died during a police arrest in Minneapolis on May 25, 2020. Protests in response to both Floyd's death, and more broadly to police violence against other black Americans, quickly spread...