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...

Francisco Alves Mendes Filho, better known as Chico Mendes, was a Brazilian rubber tapper, trade union leader and environmentalist. He fought to preserve the Amazon rainforest, and advocated for the human rights of Brazilian peasants and in...

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...

John Winston Lennon was an English singer, songwriter, musician, and activist who co-founded the Beatles, the most commercially successful and musically influential band in the history of popular music. He and fellow member Paul McCartney f...

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...

Martin Luther King, Jr. was an American pastor, activist, humanitarian, and leader in the African-American Civil Rights Movement. He is best known for his role in the advancement of civil rights using nonviolent civil disobedience based on...

Ernesto Rafael Guevara de la Serna, commonly known as Che Guevara, was an Argentine-born Marxist revolutionary and Cuban guerrilla leader. “Che” is an Argentine expression for calling someone's attention, and in some other parts of Latin Am...

Malcolm X, born Malcolm Little, was an African-American Muslim minister and a human rights activist. To his admirers he was a courageous advocate for the rights of blacks, a man who indicted white America in the harshest terms for its crime...

Nicolae Ceausescu was a Romanian communist politician. He was General Secretary of the Romanian Communist Party from 1965 to 1989, and as such was the country's second and last Communist leader. He was also the country's head of state from...

John Fitzgerald Kennedy, commonly known as Jack Kennedy, or by his initials JFK, was an American politician who served as the 35th President of the United States from January 1961 until he was assassinated in November 1963. Notable events d...

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...

Antoine Marie Jean-Baptiste Roger, comte de Saint-Exupéry, was a French writer, poet, aristocrat, journalist, and pioneering aviator. He became a laureate of several of France's highest literary awards and also won the U.S. National Book Aw...

Federico del Sagrado Corazón de Jesús García Lorca was a Spanish poet, dramatist and theatre director. García Lorca achieved international recognition as an emblematic member of the Generation of '27. He is believed to be one of thousands w...

Amelia Mary Earhart was an American aviation pioneer and author. Earhart was the first female aviator to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean. She received the U.S. Distinguished Flying Cross for this accomplishment. She set many other record...

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...