Alexandre Dumas was a French writer. His works have been translated into nearly 100 languages, and he is one of the most widely read French authors. Many of his historical novels of high adventure were originally published as serials, inclu...

Alexis de Tocqueville was a French political thinker and historian best known for his Democracy in America (appearing in two volumes: 1835 and 1840) and The Old Regime and the Revolution (1856). In both of these works, he analyzed the risin...

Vice-Admiral Robert FitzRoy RN achieved lasting fame as the captain of HMS Beagle during Charles Darwin's famous voyage, and as a pioneering meteorologist who made accurate weather forecasting a reality. He was an able surveyor and hydrogra...

Giuseppe Garibaldi was an Italian patriot and soldier of the Risorgimento. He personally led many of the military campaigns that brought about the formation of a unified Italy. He was called the "Hero of the Two Worlds," in tribute to his m...

Karl Ernst Adolf Anderssen was a German chess master. He is considered to have been the world's leading chess player for much of the 1850s and 1860s. He was quite soundly defeated by Paul Morphy who toured Europe in 1858, but Morphy retired...

Gregor Johann Mendel was a Austrian priest and scientist, and is often called the father of genetics for his study of the inheritance of traits in pea plants. Mendel showed that the inheritance of traits follows particular laws, which were...

The Xianfeng Emperor, or by temple name Emperor Wenzong of Qing, given name Yizhu, was the eighth Emperor of the Qing dynasty, and the seventh Qing emperor to rule over China proper, reigned from 1850 to 1861. During his reign the Qing dyna...

John Stith Pemberton was an American pharmacist who is best known for being the founder of Coca-Cola. In May 1886, he developed an early version of a beverage that would later become world-famous as Coca-Cola, but sold his rights to the dri...

Maximilian I was the only monarch of the Second Mexican Empire. After a distinguished career in the Austrian Navy, he was proclaimed Emperor of Mexico on April 10, 1864, with the backing of Napoleon III of France and a group of Mexican mona...

James Abbott McNeill Whistler was an American artist active during the American Gilded Age and based primarily in the United Kingdom. He was averse to sentimentality and moral allusion in painting, and a leading proponent of the credo "art...

Edgar Degas was a French artist famous for his work in painting, sculpture, printmaking and drawing. He is regarded as one of the founders of Impressionism although he rejected the term, and preferred to be called a realist. A superb draugh...

Graf Ferdinand von Zeppelin, German army officer and airship inventor and builder. He entered the Prussian army in 1858 and served in the Seven Weeks War and in the Franco-Prussian War. He was an observer with the Union army during the Amer...

John Davison Rockefeller, Sr. was an American industrialist who played a prominent role in the early oil industry with the founding of Standard Oil (ExxonMobil is the largest of its descendants). Over a forty-year period, Rockefeller built...

Cecil John Rhodes was a British imperialist and the effective founder of the state of Rhodesia (since 1980 known as Zimbabwe), named after himself. He profited greatly from southern Africa's natural resources. Rhodes was born in Bishop's...

George Eastman was an American innovator and entrepreneur who founded the Eastman Kodak Company and invented roll film, helping to bring photography to the mainstream. Roll film was also the basis for the invention of motion picture film in...