Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson marchioness de Pompadour was the mistress of Louis XV. Educated in art and literature, she married Charles-Guillaume Le Normant d'Étoiles in 1741 and became admired by Parisian society and by the king, who installe...

James Watt was a Scottish inventor and mechanical engineer whose improvements to the Newcomen steam engine were fundamental to the changes brought by the Industrial Revolution in both his native Great Britain and the rest of the world. W...

Charles Cornwallis, 1st Marquess Cornwallis KG, PC, styled Viscount Brome between 1753 and 1762 and known as The Earl Cornwallis between 1762 and 1792, was a British Army officer and colonial administrator. In the United States and the...

Alexander Hamilton was a Founding Father, soldier, economist, political philosopher, one of America's first constitutional lawyers and the first United States Secretary of the Treasury. As Secretary of the Treasury, Hamilton was the prim...

Joseph Napoleon Bonaparte, King of Naples and Sicily, King of Spain and the Indies, Count of Survilliers was the older brother of French Emperor Napoleon I, who made him King of Naples and Sicily (1806–1808) and later King of Spain. He was...

Aleksander Pavlovich Romanov or Tsar Alexander I (The Blessed), was Emperor of Russia from 1801-1825 and King of Poland from 1815–1825. The son of the Grand Duke Paul Petrovich, afterwards Paul I, and Maria Fedorovna, daughter of the Duke o...

Jacob Ludwig Carl Grimm also known as Ludwig Karl, was a German philologist, jurist, and mythologist. He is known as the discoverer of Grimm's law (linguistics), the co-author with his brother Wilhelm of the monumental Deutsches Wörterbuch,...

General Gregor MacGregor was a Scottish soldier, adventurer and confidence trickster who attempted from 1821 to 1837 to draw British and French investors and settlers to "Poyais", a fictional Central American territory that he claimed to ru...

Charles Babbage was an English mathematician, analytical philosopher, mechanical engineer and (proto-) computer scientist who originated the idea of a programmable computer. Parts of his uncompleted mechanisms are on display in the London S...

Dost Mohammad Khan was the founder of the Barakzai dynasty and one of the prominent rulers of Afghanistan during the First Anglo-Afghan War. With the decline of the Durrani dynasty, he became Emir of Afghanistan from 1826 to 1839 and then f...

Grand Duchess Anna Pavlovna of Russia was a queen consort of the Netherlands. In the Netherlands, due to nineteenth century Dutch transliteration conventions, she is better known as Anna Paulowna. She was born as the eighth child and sixth...

Ghalib was the prominent Urdu and Persian-language poet during the last years of the Mughal Empire. He used his pen-names of Ghalib (means "dominant") and Asad (means "lion"). His honorific was Dabir-ul-Mulk, Najm-ud-Daula. During his l...

Johan Rudolf Thorbecke was one of the most important Dutch politicians. In 1848, he virtually singlehandedly drafted the revision of the Dutch constitution, giving fewer powers to the king, and more to the parliament. Thorbecke was born...

Charles Goodyear was the inventor of vulcanization, a process that makes rubber harder, less soluble, and more durable. It is at the heart of rubber compounding, which played a key role at the onset of the Industrial Revolution. Goodyear ob...

Born into desperate poverty at the dawn of the nineteenth century, Millard Fillmore, 13th US President (1850-1853), climbed to the highest office in the land -- and inherited a nation breaking into fragments over the question of slavery. De...