Manfred Albrecht Freiherr von Richthofen was a German pilot and is still regarded today as the "ace of aces". He was a very successful fighter pilot, military leader and flying ace who won 80 air combats during World War I. Richthofen was k...

Harry Truman was president of America (1945-1952) after the death of F.D. Roosevelt in April 1945. Harry Truman gave the order for the atomic bombs to be dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and he represented the United States at Potsdam, the...

Vladimir Nabokov was a multilingual Russian novelist and short story writer. Nabokov wrote his first nine novels in Russian, then rose to international prominence as a master English prose stylist. He also made contributions to entomology a...

Hirohito, the Showa Emperor, reigned over Japan from 1926 to 1989. He was known in the West by his given name Hirohito (he had no surname). He was the 124th Emperor of Japan. His reign was the longest of all Japanese emperors, and oversaw t...

Machgielis "Max" Euwe was a Dutch chess Grandmaster, mathematician, author, and chess administrator. He was the fifth player to become World Chess Champion (1935–37). Euwe served as President of FIDE, the World Chess Federation, from 1970 t...

Marcel Lajos Breuer was a Hungarian-born modernist architect, and furniture designer. At the Bauhaus he designed the Wassily Chair and the Cesca Chair which is “among the 10 most important chairs of the 20th century.” Breuer extended the sc...

Julius Robert Oppenheimer was an American theoretical physicist and professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley. He is among the persons who are often called the "father of the atomic bomb" for their role in the Manhattan...

Salvador Dalí was a prominent Spanish surrealist artist of Catalan ethnicity born in Figueres, Catalonia, Spain. Dalí was a skilled draftsman, best known for the striking and bizarre images in his surrealist work. His painterly skills ar...

Joseph Louis Barrow, better known as Joe Louis, was an American professional boxer and the World Heavyweight Champion from 1937 to 1949. He is considered to be one of the greatest heavyweights of all time. Nicknamed the Brown Bomber, Louis...

George Orson Welles was a uniquely talented artist, but one who was doomed to spend much of his life unable to realize his ambitions. It didn't start that way: Welles was a precocious and gifted child who began acting, writing, and directin...

María Eva Duarte de Perón was the wife of Argentine President Juan Perón (1895–1974) and First Lady of Argentina from 1946 until her death in 1952. She is usually referred to as Eva Perón or Evita. She was born in poverty in the rural vi...

Karol Jzef Wojtyla known as John Paul II since his October 1978 election to the papacy, was born in Wadowice, a small city 50 kilometres from Cracow in Poland, on May 18, 1920. No other Pope has encountered so many individuals like John...

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...

Pol Pot was a Cambodian politician and revolutionary who led the Khmer Rouge from 1963 until 1997 and took part in orchestrating the Cambodian genocide. From 1963 to 1981, he served as the General Secretary of the Communist Party of Kampuch...

Elizabeth II is Queen of the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and twelve countries that have become independent since her accession on 6 February 1952: Jamaica, Barbados, the Bahamas, Grenada, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands...