Konrad Hermann Joseph Adenauer was a German statesman who led his nation from the ruins of World War II to one of the most prosperous nations in Europe. He brought Germany prosperity, democracy, stability and respect. He was the first chanc...

George Catlett Marshall Jr. was an American statesman and soldier. He was Chief of Staff of the United States Army under presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman, and served as Secretary of State and Secretary of Defense under T...

Robert Schuman was a Luxembourg-born French statesman. Schuman was a Christian Democrat (MRP) and an independent political thinker and activist. Twice Prime Minister of France, a reformist Minister of Finance and a Foreign Minister, he was...

Willem Drees was a Dutch politician, prime minister of the Netherlands from 1948 until 1958, as a member of the social-democratic Dutch Labour Party (PvdA). Born in Amsterdam, Drees was known as Vadertje Drees ("Father Drees"), and was very...

Jean Monnet, called the Father of the European Community. A brief timeline summarises how and why the Jean Monnet Foundation for Europe was established in Lausanne in 1978. It was the outcome of the convergence of two paths, initiated by th...

Boris Leonidovich Pasternak was a Nobel Prize-winning Russian and Soviet poet of Jewish descent, novelist and translator of Goethe and Shakespeare. In Russia, Pasternak is most celebrated as a poet. My Sister Life, written in 1917, is one...

Thirty-Fourth President USA,1953-1961. Bringing to the Presidency his prestige as commanding general of the victorious forces in Europe during World War II, Dwight D. Eisenhower obtained a truce in Korea and worked incessantly during his tw...

Jean Paul Getty was an American industrialist. He founded the Getty Oil Company, and in 1957 Fortune magazine named him the richest living American, whilst the 1966 Guinness Book of Records named him as the world's richest private citizen,...

Josip Broz Tito was a Yugoslav revolutionary and statesman, serving in various roles from 1943 until his death in 1980. During World War II he was the leader of the Partisans, often regarded as the most effective resistance movement in occu...

Mao Zedong or Mao Tse-tung, also known as Chairman Mao, was a Chinese communist revolutionary, poet, political theorist and founding father of the People's Republic of China, which he governed as the Chairman of the Communist Party of China...

Raymond Fernand Loewy was one of the best known industrial designers of the 20th century. Born in France, he spent most of his professional career in the United States where he influenced countless aspects of North American culture. Among h...

Jean Giono was a French author renowned for his works of fiction set in the Provence region of France. Among his most famous writings are the three novels of his "Pan Trilogy", which allude to the Greek God Pan and pantheism: Colline, Un de...

John Edgar Hoover was the first Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) of the United States. Appointed director of the Bureau of Investigation—predecessor to the FBI—in 1924, he was instrumental in founding the FBI in 1935, w...

Jan Hendrik Oort was a Dutch astronomer who made significant contributions to the understanding of the Milky Way and who was a pioneer in the field of radio astronomy. His New York Times obituary called him “one of the century's foremost ex...

Kuiper is considered to be the father of modern planetary science for his wide ranging studies of the solar system. Although he contributed to astrophysics, established the atmosphere of Saturn's moon Titan, and discovered Saturn's moon Mir...