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...

Paul Cézanne was a French artist and Post-Impressionist painter whose work laid the foundations of the transition from the 19th-century conception of artistic endeavor to a new and radically different world of art in the 20th century. Cézan...

Bernadette Soubirous was the firstborn daughter of a miller from Lourdes (Lorda in Occitan), France, and is venerated as a saint in the Catholic Church. Soubirous is best known for the Marian apparitions of a "young lady" who asked for a...

André Jules Michelin was a French industrialist who, with his brother Édouard (1859–1940), founded the Michelin Tyre Company (Compagnie Générale des Établissements Michelin) in 1888 in the French city of Clermont-Ferrand. In 1900, André...

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...

Pierre de Frédy, Baron de Coubertin was a French educator and historian, and founder of the International Olympic Committee. He is considered the father of the modern Olympic Games. The ancient Olympic Games were held every four years in th...

David Lloyd George was a British Liberal politician and statesman. He was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom at the head of a wartime coalition government between the years 1916–22 and was the Leader of the Liberal Party from 1926–31. Dur...

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...

Scientist and early advocate for industrial uses for farm crops (bio-energy). Carver earned a B.S. from the Iowa Agricultural College in 1894 and an M.S. in 1896. He became a member of the faculty of Iowa State College and then Tuskegee Ins...

Emanuel Lasker was a German chess player, mathematician, and philosopher who was World Chess Champion for 27 years (from 1894 to 1921). In his prime Lasker was one of the most dominant champions, and he is still generally regarded as one of...

Henri-Émile-Benoît Matisse was a French artist, known for both his use of colour and his fluid and original draughtsmanship. He was a draughtsman, printmaker, and sculptor, but is known primarily as a painter. Matisse is commonly regarde...

Joseph Baermann Strauss was an American structural engineer of German descent, who revolutionized the design of bascule bridges. He was the chief engineer of the Golden Gate Bridge, a suspension bridge. As Chief engineer of the Golden G...

Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin was a Russian composer and pianist. Scriabin, who was influenced early in his life by the works of Frédéric Chopin, composed works that are characterised by a highly tonal idiom (these works are associated wi...

Albert Schweitzer was a French-German theologian, organist, writer, humanitarian, philosopher, and physician. A Lutheran, Schweitzer challenged both the secular view of Jesus as depicted by historical-critical methodology current at this ti...