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...

Honoré de Balzac was a French novelist and playwright. The novel sequence La Comédie Humaine, which presents a panorama of post-Napoleonic French life, is generally viewed as his magnum opus. Owing to his keen observation of detail and u...

John Brown was a white American abolitionist who believed armed insurrection was the only way to overthrow the institution of slavery in the United States. During the 1856 conflict in Kansas, Brown commanded forces at the Battle of Black Ja...

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...

English poet Robert Browning was born in a suburb of London on May 7, 1812. He wrote his first book of poetry at the age of twelve, and was fluent in four languages by the age of fourteen. At sixteen, he began his studies at University Coll...

Søren Aabye Kierkegaard was a profound and prolific writer in the Danish "golden age" of intellectual and artistic activity. His work crosses the boundaries of philosophy, theology, psychology, literary criticism, devotional literature and...

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...

Karl Heinrich Marx was a German philosopher, economist, sociologist, historian, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. Marx's work in economics laid the basis for the current understanding of labour and its relation to capital, and has in...

Florence Nightingale was an English social reformer and statistician, and the founder of modern nursing. Nightingale came to prominence while serving as a manager of nurses trained by her during the Crimean War, where she organised the t...

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...

Thomas Henry Huxley was one of the first adherents to Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, and did more than anyone else to advance its acceptance among scientists and the public alike. As is evident from the letter quoted abo...

Ferdinand Freiherr von Richthofen was a German traveller, geographer, and scientist. He traveled or studied in the Alps of Tyrol and the Carpathians in Transylvania. In 1860, he joined the Eulenburg Expedition, a Prussian expedition which...

John Wilkes Booth was an American stage actor who assassinated President Abraham Lincoln at Ford's Theatre, in Washington, D.C., on April 14, 1865. Booth was a member of the prominent 19th century Booth theatrical family from Maryland and,...