Hiram Bingham III was an American academic, explorer and politician. He rediscovered the Inca settlement of Machu Picchu in 1911. Later, Bingham served as Governor of Connecticut and a member of the United States Senate. Machu Picchu ha...

Margaretha Geertruida "Margreet" Zelle MacLeod, better known by the stage name Mata Hari, was a member of the Frisian minority from the Netherlands, and was an exotic dancer and courtesan who was convicted of being a spy and executed by fir...

John Arthur Johnson, better known as Jack Johnson and nicknamed the “Galveston Giant”, was an American boxer and arguably the best heavyweight of his generation. He was the first black Heavyweight Champion of the World (1908-1915), a feat w...

Karl Bernhard Zoeppritz was a German geophysicist who made important contributions to seismology, in particular the formulation of the Zoeppritz equations. These equations relate the amplitudes of P-waves and S-waves at each side of an i...

Anna Pavlovna was a Russian ballerina of the late 19th and the early 20th century. She is widely regarded as one of the finest classical ballet dancers in history and was most noted as a Principal artist of the Imperial Russian Ballet and t...

Cecil Blount DeMille was an Academy Award-winning American film director. He was famous in the first half of the 20th century, known for the flamboyance and showmanship of his movies. DeMille directed dozens of silent films, including Param...

James Joyce was an Irish novelist and poet, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century. Joyce is best known for Ulysses (1922), a landmark work in which the episodes of Homer'...

Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky was a Russian (and later, a naturalized French and American) composer, pianist and conductor. He is widely considered one of the most important and influential composers of the 20th century. Stravinsky's compo...

Faisal bin al-Hussein bin Ali al-Hashemi, was for a short time King of Greater Syria in 1920 and King of Iraq from 23 August 1921 to 1933. He was a member of the Hashemite dynasty, a descendant of the tribe of Muhammad. Faisal encouraged ov...

Gabrielle Bonheur "Coco" Chanel was a pioneering French fashion designer whose modernist philosophy, menswear-inspired fashions, and pursuit of expensive simplicity made her an important figure in 20th-century fashion. Her influence on haut...

Amedeo Clemente Modigliani was an Italian painter and sculptor who worked mainly in France. He is known for portraits and nudes in a modern style characterized by elongation of faces and figures that were not received well during his lifeti...

Niels Henrik David Bohr was a Danish physicist who made fundamental contributions to understanding atomic structure and quantum mechanics, for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922. He was also part of the team of physicists...

Srinivasa Ramanujan was an Indian mathematician and autodidact. Though he had almost no formal training in pure mathematics, he made extraordinary contributions to mathematical analysis, number theory, infinite series, and continued fractio...

Charles I, Last Emperor of Austria, the last King of Bohemia as Charles III, Hungary and Croatia-Slavonia, and the last monarch of the Habsburg dynasty. He reigned as Charles I as Emperor of Austria and Charles IV as King of Hungary from 19...

Lieutenant-Colonel Thomas Edward Lawrence, CB, DSO, known professionally as T.E. Lawrence and, later, T.E. Shaw, but most famously as "Lawrence of Arabia," gained international renown for his role as a British liaison officer during the Ara...