Samuel Brannan was an American settler, businessman, journalist, and prominent Mormon who founded the California Star, the first newspaper in San Francisco, California. He is considered the first to publicize the California Gold Rush and wa...

David Livingstone was a Scottish Congregationalist pioneer medical missionary and an explorer in Africa. His meeting with H. M. Stanley gave rise to the popular quotation, "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?" Perhaps one of the most popular nat...

Napoléon François Charles Joseph Bonaparte, Prince Imperial, King of Rome, known in the Austrian court as Franz from 1814 onward, Duke of Reichstadt from 1818, was the son of Napoleon I, Emperor of the French, and his second wife, Archduche...

Frédéric François Chopin was a Polish composer and virtuoso pianist of the Romantic era who wrote primarily for the solo piano. He gained and has maintained renown worldwide as a leading musician of his era, whose "poetic genius was based o...

Victorian poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning published her first poem in 1820, at the age of fourteen. In 1826, she published her first collection of poems, entitled "An Essay on Mind and Other Poems." In 1845, she met fellow poet Robert Brown...

Johann Strauss I was a Austrian violinist and composer of waltzes and other works, notably Redetzky March (1848). His son Johann (1825–1899), known as “the Younger,” is sometimes called “the Waltz King” and is best remembered for his nu...

Victor Marie Hugo was a French poet, novelist, and dramatist of the Romantic movement. Hugo is considered to be one of the greatest and best-known French writers. Outside of France, his most famous works are the novels Les Misérables, 1862,...

William I, also known as Wilhelm I, of the House of Hohenzollern was the King of Prussia (2 January 1861 – 9 March 1888) and the first German Emperor (18 January 1871 – 9 March 1888). Under the leadership of William and his Chancellor Otto...

Georg Simon Ohm was a German physicist. As a high school teacher, Ohm began his research with the recently invented electrochemical cell, invented by Italian Count Alessandro Volta. Using equipment of his own creation, Ohm determined that t...

Arthur Schopenhauer was a German philosopher. He is best known for his 1818 work The World as Will and Representation (expanded in 1844), wherein he characterizes the phenomenal world as the product of a blind and insatiable metaphysical wi...

Ivan Nabokov was a Russian Adjutant general and general of infantry prominent during the Napoleonic wars. Nabokov came from an old noble family based in the Novgorod governorate, where his father general Alexander Nabokov was a landowner...

Wilhelm Carl Grimm was a German author and anthropologist, and the younger brother of Jakob Grimm, of the library duo the Brothers Grimm. Wilhelm's character was a complete contrast to that of his brother. As a boy, he was strong and hea...

José de San Martín was an Argentine general and the prime leader of the southern part of South America's successful struggle for independence from Spain. Born in Yapeyú, he left his mother country at an early age and studied in Madrid, Spai...

Muhammad Ali Pasha was an Ottoman Albanian commander in the Ottoman army, who became Wāli, and self-declared Khedive of Egypt and Sudan with the Ottoman's temporary approval. Though not a modern nationalist, he is regarded as the found...

Andrew Jackson was the seventh President of the United States (1829–1837). He was also military governor of Florida (1821), commander of the American forces at the Battle of New Orleans (1815), a founder of the modern Democratic Party, and...