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...

Julian was Roman emperor from 361 to 363, as well as a notable philosopher and author in Greek. His rejection of Christianity, and his promotion of Neoplatonic Hellenism in its place, caused him to be remembered as Julian the Apostate by th...

Peter II the Catholic was the King of Aragon and Count of Barcelona from 1196 to 1213. He was born in Huesca, the son of Alfonso II of Aragon and Sancha of Castile. In 1205 he acknowledged the feudal supremacy of the papacy and was crown...

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...

Cornelis de Houtman, was a Dutch explorer who discovered a new sea route from Europe to Indonesia and managed to begin the Dutch spice trade. At the time, the Portuguese Empire held a monopoly on the spice trade, and the voyage was a symbol...

Edward Teach, better known as Blackbeard, was an English pirate who operated around the West Indies and the eastern coast of Britain's North American colonies. Little is known about his early life, but he may have been a sailor on privateer...

Ivan VI Antonovich of Russia was Emperor of Russia in 1740–41. He was only two months old when he was proclaimed emperor and his mother named regent. Scarcely a year later his first cousin twice-removed, Elizabeth, seized the throne in...

Joseph Smith, Jr. was the American religious figure who founded the Latter Day Saint movement, also known as Mormonism. Smith's followers declared him to be the first latter-day prophet, whose mission was to restore the original Christian c...

James Butler Hickok, known as "Wild Bill" Hickok, was a folk character of the American Old West. Some of his exploits as reported at the time were fictionalized, but his skills as a gunfighter and gambler provided the basis for his enduring...

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...