John Kerr was a Scottish physicist and a pioneer in the field of electro-optics. He is best known for the discovery of what is now called the Kerr effect. Kerr's most important experimental work was the discovery of double refraction in...

Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was an American poet. Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts. Although part of a prominent family with strong ties to its community, Dickinson lived much of her life in reclusive isolation. After studying at...

Alexandre Gustave Eiffel was a French civil engineer. A graduate of École Centrale Paris, he made his name with various bridges for the French railway network, most famously the Garabit viaduct. He is best known for the world-famous Eiffel...

Elisabeth of Austria was the wife of Emperor Franz Joseph I, and thus Empress of Austria and Queen of Hungary. Born into Bavarian royalty, Elisabeth (Sisi) enjoyed an informal upbringing, before marrying Franz Joseph at 16. She was sudde...

George Armstrong Custer was a United States Army officer and cavalry commander in the American Civil War and the Indian Wars. Raised in Michigan and Ohio, Custer was admitted to West Point in 1858, where he graduated last in his class. Howe...

Crazy Horse was a Native American war leader of the Oglala Lakota. He took up arms against the U.S. Federal government to fight against encroachments on the territories and way of life of the Lakota people, including leading a war party at...

Robert Heinrich Hermann Koch was a German physician and microbiologist. As the founder of modern bacteriology, he identified the specific causative agents of tuberculosis, cholera, and anthrax and gave experimental support for the concept o...

Antoine Henri Becquerel was a physicist, Nobel laureate, and the first person to discover evidence of radioactivity. For work in this field he, along with Marie Curie and Pierre Curie, received the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics. The SI unit f...

Thomas Woodrow Wilson was the twenty-eighth President of the United States (1856-1924). A devout Presbyterian, and leading intellectual of the Progressive Era, he served as President of Princeton University and then became the Governor of N...

Giacomo Puccini was the most important composer of Italian opera after Verdi. He wrote in the verismo style, a counterpart to the movement of Realism in literature and a trend that favored subjects and characters from everyday life for oper...

Georges-Pierre Seurat was a French post-Impressionist painter and draftsman. He is noted for his innovative use of drawing media and for devising the painting techniques known as chromoluminarism and pointillism. Seurat's artistic personali...

Franz Ferdinand was an Archduke of Austria-Este, Austro-Hungarian and Royal Prince of Hungary and of Bohemia and, from 1896 until his death, heir presumptive to the Austro-Hungarian throne. His assassination in Sarajevo precipitated Aust...

Edvard Munch was a Norwegian Symbolist painter, printmaker and an important forerunner of expressionistic art. His best-known composition, The Scream, is part of a series The Frieze of Life, in which Munch explored the themes of life, love,...

Joseph Rudyard Kipling was an English short-story writer, poet, and novelist. He wrote tales and poems of British soldiers in India and stories for children. He was born in Bombay, in the Bombay Presidency of British India, and was taken by...

Johan Julius Christian Sibelius was a Finnish composer of classical music and one of the most notable composers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His music played an important role in the formation of the Finnish national identity....