The Peace of Münster was a treaty between the United Netherlands and Spain signed in 1648. It was a landmark treaty for the Dutch republic and one of the key events in Dutch history; with it, the United Netherlands finally became independen...

The Treaty of Utrecht, which established the Peace of Utrecht, comprises a series of individual peace treaties, rather than a single document, signed by the belligerents in the War of the Spanish Succession, in the Dutch city of Utrecht in...

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...

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...

W.E.B. Du Bois was an early African-American civil rights leader and scholar and the first non-white person to receive a doctorate from Harvard University. He was an outspoken critic of the social inequalities that existed in the US during...

Gandhi became the international symbol of a free India. He lived a spiritual and ascetic life of prayer, fasting, and meditation. The Mahatma's political and spiritual hold on India was so great that the British authorities dared not interf...

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...

The Peace Palace is an international law administrative building in The Hague, the Netherlands. It houses the International Court of Justice (which is the principal judicial body of the United Nations), the Permanent Court of Arbitration (P...

Yasser Arafat was elected chairman of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) in 1969. Though originally an advocate of all-out guerrilla war, from 1974 on he and the PLO sometimes seemed to be seeking a negotiated resolution of the P...

Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev, was leader of the Soviet Union from 1985 until 1991. His attempts at reform led to the end of the Cold War, but also inadvertently caused the end of the political supremacy of the Communist Party of the Soviet...

Professor Dr. Muhammad Yunus is a Bangladeshi banker and economist. He is the developer and founder of the concept of microcredit, the extension of small loans to entrepreneurs too poor to qualify for traditional bank loans. Yunus is also t...

The name "United Nations", coined by United States President Franklin D. Roosevelt, was first used in the "Declaration by United Nations" of 1 January 1942, during the Second World War, when representatives of 26 nations pledged their Go...