Frederick Law Olmsted was an American landscape architect, journalist, social critic, and public administrator. He is popularly considered to be the father of American landscape architecture. Olmsted was famous for co-designing many well-kn...

William Booth was an English Methodist preacher who founded The Salvation Army and became its first General (1878–1912). The Christian movement with a quasi-military structure and government founded in 1865 has spread from London, England,...

Alfred Bernhard Nobel was a Swedish chemist, engineer, inventor, businessman, and philanthropist. Known for inventing dynamite, Nobel also owned Bofors, which he had redirected from its previous role as primarily an iron and steel produc...

Leopold Louis-Philippe Marie Victor of Saxe-Coburg, succeeded his father, Leopold I of Belgium, to the Belgian throne in 1865 as Leopold II, King of the Belgians and remained king until his death. Outside of Belgium, however, he is chiefly...

Cesare Lombroso was an Italian criminologist and physician, founder of the Italian School of Positivist Criminology. Lombroso rejected the established Classical School, which held that crime was a characteristic trait of human nature. Inste...

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...

John Wilkes Booth was an American stage actor who assassinated President Abraham Lincoln at Ford's Theatre, in Washington, D.C., on April 14, 1865. Booth was a member of the prominent 19th century Booth theatrical family from Maryland and,...

Duleep Singh and later in life nicknamed the Black Prince of Perthshire, was the last Maharaja of the Sikh Empire. He was the youngest son of the legendary "Lion of the Punjab" Maharaja Ranjit Singh and Maharani Jind Kaur, and came to power...

John Muir was a Scottish-American naturalist, author, and early advocate of preservation of wilderness in the United States. His letters, essays, and books telling of his adventures in nature, especially in the Sierra Nevada mountains of Ca...

Baroness Bertha von Suttner, Gräfin (Countess) Kinsky von Wchinitz und Tettau was an Austrian novelist, radical (organizational) pacifist, and the first woman to be a Nobel Peace Prize laureate. Suttner became a leading figure in the pea...

William Frederick "Buffalo Bill" Cody was an American soldier, bison hunter and showman. He was born in the Iowa Territory (now the American state of Iowa), near LeClaire. He was one of the most colorful figures of the American Old West, an...

Adrian Dietrich Lothar von Trotha was a German military commander widely condemned for his conduct of the Herero Wars in German South-West Africa, especially for the events that led to the near-extermination of the Herero. At the Battle of...

Cut Nyak Dhien or Tjoet Nja' Dhien was a leader of the Acehnese guerrilla forces during the Aceh War. Following the death of her husband Teuku Umar, she led guerrilla actions against the Dutch for 25 years. She was posthumously awarded the...

Anténor Firmin was a Haitian anthropologist, journalist, and politician. Firmin is best known for his book De l'Égalité des Races Humaines (English: On the Equality of Human Races), which was published as a rebuttal to French writer Count A...

José Julián Martí Pérez was a leader of the Cuban independence movement as well as a renowned poet and writer. Active in the Cuban independence movement from boyhood, he was deported to Spain in 1871, returning in 1878. Exiled again for con...