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...

Franklin Pierce, the 14th President of the United States (1853-1857), came to office during a period of growing tension between the North and South. A politician of limited ability, Pierce was behind one of the most crucial pieces of legisl...

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...

The Dowager Empress Cixi popularly known in China as the Western Empress Dowager, and officially known posthumously as Empress Xiaoqin Xian, was a powerful and charismatic figure who was the de facto ruler of the Manchu Qing Dynasty, rulin...

Samuel Langhorne Clemens, known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American writer, humorist, entrepreneur, publisher, and lecturer. He was lauded as the "greatest humorist this country has produced", and William Faulkner called him "the fa...

Andrew Carnegie was a Scottish American industrialist who led the enormous expansion of the American steel industry in the late 19th century. He was also one of the highest profile philanthropists of his era and had given away almost 90 per...

Johannes Diderik van der Waals was a Dutch scientist and thermodynamicist famous for his work on the equation of state for gases and liquids which describe the relation between the pressure, volume, and temperature of fluids (gases and liq...

Auguste-René Rodin, French sculptor and draughtsman. He is the only sculptor of the modern age regarded in his lifetime and afterwards to be on a par with Michelangelo. Both made images with widespread popular appeal, and both stressed the...

Oscar-Claude Monet was a founder of French Impressionist painting, and the most consistent and prolific practitioner of the movement's philosophy of expressing one's perceptions before nature, especially as applied to plein-air landscape pa...

Edward VII was King of the United Kingdom and the British Dominions and Emperor of India from 22 January 1901 until his death on 6 May 1910. He was the first British monarch of the House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, which was renamed the House of...

John William Strutt, 3rd Baron Rayleigh, was a British scientist who made extensive contributions to both theoretical and experimental physics. He spent all of his academic career at the University of Cambridge. Among many honours, he recei...

Karl Friedrich Benz was a German engine designer and automobile engineer, generally regarded as the inventor of the gasoline-powered automobile. Other German contemporaries, Gottlieb Daimler and Wilhelm Maybach, also worked independently on...

Abraham "Bram" Stoker was an Irish author, best known today for his 1897 Gothic novel Dracula. During his lifetime, he was better known as the personal assistant of actor Henry Irving and business manager of the Lyceum Theatre in London, wh...

Sir Horace Lamb was an English applied mathematician and author of several influential texts on classical physics, among them Hydrodynamics (1895) and Dynamical Theory of Sound (1910). Both of these books remain in print. The word vorticity...

Henry McCarty, also known as William H. Bonney, and known popularly as Billy the Kid, was an American Old West gunfighter who participated in New Mexico's Lincoln County War. He is known to have killed eight men. Before he started using...