Feodor III of Russia was the Tsar of all Russia between 1676 and 1682. Fyodor was born in Moscow, the eldest surviving son of Tsar Alexis and Maria Miloslavskaya. In 1676, at the age of fifteen, he succeeded his father on the throne. He was...

Tomaso Giovanni Albinoni, Italian composer. Born to a wealthy Venetian family, he was not obliged to work for a living and became a highly prolific composer. He had more than 50 operas successfully produced between 1694 and 1741, though few...

Peter the Great ruled the Tsardom of Russia and later the Russian Empire from 7 May 1682 until his death, jointly ruling before 1696 with his elder half-brother, Ivan V. Through a number of successful wars he expanded the Tsardom into a muc...

Alexander Pope is considered one of the greatest English poets of the eighteenth century. Born to a Roman Catholic family in 1688, Pope was educated mostly at home, in part due to laws in force at the time upholding the status of the establ...

Carl Linnaeus was a Swedish botanist, physician, and zoologist, who laid the foundations for the modern biological naming scheme of binomial nomenclature. He is known as the father of modern taxonomy, and is also considered one of the fathe...

Adam Smith was a Scottish moral philosopher, pioneer of political economy, and a key figure in the Scottish Enlightenment. Smith is best known for two classic works: The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), and An Inquiry into the Nature a...

Adam Ferguson was a Scottish philosopher, social scientist and historian of the Scottish Enlightenment. He is sometimes called "the father of modern sociology." Ferguson's Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767) drew on classical autho...

James Hutton was a Scottish physician, geologist, naturalist, chemical manufacturer and experimental agriculturalist. He is considered the father of modern geology. His theories of geology and geologic time, also called deep time, came to b...

Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin was a French physician who proposed on 10 October 1789 the use of a device to carry out death penalties in France. While he did not invent the guillotine, and in fact opposed the death penalty, his name became an...

Britain's King George III was the 18th century monarch who lost the fight to keep control over the American colonies. The third monarch of the Hanover house and the first to be born in England, he held the throne from 1760 until 1820, a rei...

Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de Sade, was a French nobleman, revolutionary politician, philosopher, and writer, famous for his libertine sexuality. His works include novels, short stories, plays, dialogues, and political tracts; in h...

Jean-Paul Marat was a physician, political theorist and scientist best known for his career in France as a radical journalist and politician during the French Revolution. His journalism became renowned for its fierce tone, uncompromising st...

William Pitt the Younger was a British politician of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. He became the youngest Prime Minister in 1783 at the age of 24 (although the term Prime Minister was not then used). He left office in 1801, but wa...

Rear-Admiral Sir Francis Beaufort, was a hydrographer and officer in Britain's Royal Navy. Beaufort was the creator of the Beaufort scale for indicating wind force. Sir Francis Beaufort's father, Daniel Augustus Beaufort, was a Protestant c...

John Constable was an English landscape painter in the naturalistic tradition. Born in Suffolk, he is known principally for his landscape paintings of Dedham Vale, the area surrounding his home — now known as "Constable Country" — which he...