Georges Jacques Danton was a leading figure in the early stages of the French Revolution and the first President of the Committee of Public Safety. Danton's role in the onset of the Revolution has been disputed; many historians describe him...

Johann Christoph Friedrich (later: von) Schiller, was a German poet, philosopher, historian, and dramatist. During the last several years of his life (1788–1805), Schiller struck a productive, if complicated, friendship with already famous...

Robert Fulton was an American engineer and inventor who is widely credited with developing the first commercially successful steamboat. He also designed a new type of steam warship. In 1800 he was commissioned by Napoleon Bonaparte to desig...

Count Josef von Radetz was a Czech nobleman and field marshal, a member of House of Radetzky in the Kingdom of Bohemia. He served as chief of the general staff in the Austrian Habsburg Monarchy during the later period of the Napoleonic Wars...

Maharaja Ranjit Singh, the legendary "Lion of the Punjab", was the founder of the Sikh Empire, which came to power in the Indian subcontinent in the early half of the 19th century. The empire, based in the Punjab region, existed from 1799 t...

Niccolò Paganini was an Italian violinist, violist, guitarist, and composer. He was the most celebrated violin virtuoso of his time, and left his mark as one of the pillars of modern violin technique. His 24 Caprices for Solo Violin Op. 1 a...

Louis Daguerre was a doctor, a painter and a theatrical set designer, but he is best remembered as one of the inventors of photography. Both he and Nicéphore Niepce began their initial experiments separately, but in 1829, they teamed up. Ni...

John Keats was an English Romantic poet. He was one of the main figures of the second generation of Romantic poets, along with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, despite his works having been in publication for only four years before his...

Under James Knox Polk,11th US President (1845-1849), the United States grew by more than a million square miles, across Texas and New Mexico to California and even Oregon. More than any other President, Polk exercised "Manifest Destiny," a...

Sir Charles Lyell was a British lawyer and the foremost geologist of his day. He is best known as the author of Principles of Geology, which popularised James Hutton's concepts of uniformitarianism – the idea that the earth was shaped by sl...

Bellini, Vincenzo, Italian opera composer. He acquired his musical training from his grandfather and father, and began composing religious and secular music in his childhood. His first opera, Adelson e Salvini, was successfully performed in...

Wilhelm Eduard Weber was a German physicist and, together with Carl Friedrich Gauss, inventor of the first electromagnetic telegraph. In 1856 with Rudolf Kohlrausch (1809–1858) he demonstrated that the ratio of electrostatic to electroma...

Andrew Jackson Downing was an American landscape designer, horticulturist, and writer, a prominent advocate of the Gothic Revival in the United States, and editor of The Horticulturist magazine (1846–52). Downing is considered to be a found...

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky was a Russian writer of novels, short stories and essays. Dostoyevsky's literary works explore human psychology in the troubled political, social and spiritual context of 19th-century Russian society. A Slavo...

Georges Bizet, French composer. Son of a music teacher, he gained admission to the Paris Conservatoire at age 9, and at age 17 he wrote the precocious Symphony in C Major (1855). Intent on success on the operatic stage, he produced The Pear...