William Tecumseh Sherman was an American soldier, businessman, educator and author. He served as a General in the Union Army during the American Civil War (1861–65), for which he received recognition for his outstanding command of military...

Jules Gabriel Verne was a French novelist, poet, and playwright best known for his adventure novels and his profound influence on the literary genre of science fiction. His collaboration with the publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel led to the...

Édouard Manet was a French painter. He was one of the first 19th-century artists to paint modern life, and a pivotal figure in the transition from Realism to Impressionism. His early masterworks, The Luncheon on the Grass (Le déjeuner su...

Dimitri Mendeleev, was a Russian chemist. He is credited as being the primary creator of the first version of the periodic table of elements. Unlike other contributors to the table, Mendeleev predicted the properties of elements yet to be d...

Sir Henry Morton Stanley was a journalist and explorer famous for his exploration of Africa and his search for David Livingstone. Stanley travelled to Zanzibar and outfitted an expedition with the best of everything, requiring no fewer than...

Thomas Alva Edison was an American inventor and businessman who developed many devices which greatly influenced life in the 20th century. Dubbed "The Wizard of Menlo Park" by a newspaper reporter, he was one of the first inventors to apply...

Sergei Sergeievich Korsakoff was a Russian neuropsychiatrist, known for his studies on alcoholic psychosis. His name is lent to the eponymous Korsakoff's syndrome and Wernicke–Korsakoff syndrome. Korsakoff was one of the greatest neurop...

Wilhelm II or William II was the last German Emperor (Kaiser) and King of Prussia, ruling the German Empire and the Kingdom of Prussia from 15 June 1888 to 9 November 1918. He was a grandson of the British Queen Victoria and related to many...

Anton Chekhov wrote both plays and short stories. He is generally listed in the first rank of Russian playwrights and in the high second rank (a notch below Pushkin and Tolstoy) as a writer of prose. His most famous plays include The Seagul...

Solomon Robert Guggenheim was an American businessman, art collector, and philanthropist. He started collecting the old masters in the 1890's. He retired in 1919 to become an art collector. In 1926, he met Hilla Rebay. In 1930, they visited...

Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin was a Russian mystic with an influence in the later days of Russia's Romanov dynasty. Rasputin played an important role in the lives of the Tsar Nicholas II, his wife the Tsarina Alexandra, and their only son the...

Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton was a polar explorer who led three British expeditions to the Antarctic, and one of the principal figures of the period known as the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration. Born in Kilkea, Athy, County Kildare, Irel...

Douglas MacArthur is a major figure in the US military and diplomatic history of WWII and post-WWII. As general of the army, he helped conquer the Japanese Empire and played a major role in rebuilding the nation and drafting its first democ...

James Joyce was an Irish novelist and poet, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century. Joyce is best known for Ulysses (1922), a landmark work in which the episodes of Homer'...

Adeline Virginia Woolf was an English writer who is considered one of the foremost modernists of the twentieth century and a pioneer in the use of stream of consciousness as a narrative device. Born in an affluent household in Kensington, L...