Matthew Calbraith Perry was a Commodore of the U.S. Navy and commanded a number of ships. He served in several wars, most notably in the Mexican-American War and the War of 1812. He played a leading role in the opening of Japan to the West...

Ferdinand Victor Eugène Delacroix was the most important of the French Romantic painters. Delacroix's use of expressive brushstrokes and his study of the optical effects of colour profoundly shaped the work of the Impressionists, while his...

Hans Christian Andersen was a Danish author. Although a prolific writer of plays, travelogues, novels, and poems, Andersen is best remembered for his fairy tales. Andersen's popularity is not limited to children; his stories, called eventyr...

Isambard Kingdom Brunel was a leading British civil engineer, famed for his bridges and dockyards, and especially for the construction of the first major British railway, the Great Western Railway; a series of famous steamships, including t...

Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte was the first President of the French Second Republic and, as Napoleon III, the Emperor of the Second French Empire. He was the nephew and heir of Napoleon I. He was the first President of France to be elected by a...

Prince Otto Eduard Leopold von Bismarck, Duke of Lauenburg, was one of the most prominent European aristocrats and statesmen of the nineteenth century. As Prime Minister of Prussia from 1862 to 1890, he engineered the unification of the num...

Charlotte Brontë was an English novelist and poet, the eldest of the three Brontë sisters who survived into adulthood and whose novels have become classics of English literature. She first published her works (including her best known novel...

Alexander II was the Emperor (tsar) of Russia from 1855 until his assassination. He was also the Grand Duke of Finland. He was born the eldest son of Nicholas I of Russia and Charlotte of Prussia, daughter of Frederick William III of Prussi...

Charles Pierre Baudelaire was a French poet who also produced notable work as an essayist, art critic, and pioneering translator of Edgar Allan Poe. His most famous work, Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil), expresses the changing na...

Ulysses S. Grant, 18th President of the United States (1869-1877), is best known as the Union general who led the North to victory over the Confederate South during the American Civil War. As a President, however, he has long been dismissed...

Frederick Law Olmsted was an American landscape architect, journalist, social critic, and public administrator. He is popularly considered to be the father of American landscape architecture. Olmsted was famous for co-designing many well-kn...

William Booth was an English Methodist preacher who founded The Salvation Army and became its first General (1878–1912). The Christian movement with a quasi-military structure and government founded in 1865 has spread from London, England,...

Leopold Louis-Philippe Marie Victor of Saxe-Coburg, succeeded his father, Leopold I of Belgium, to the Belgian throne in 1865 as Leopold II, King of the Belgians and remained king until his death. Outside of Belgium, however, he is chiefly...

John Pierpont Morgan was an American financier, banker and art collector who dominated corporate finance and industrial consolidation during his time. In 1892 Morgan arranged the merger of Edison General Electric and Thompson-Houston Electr...

John Muir was a Scottish-American naturalist, author, and early advocate of preservation of wilderness in the United States. His letters, essays, and books telling of his adventures in nature, especially in the Sierra Nevada mountains of Ca...