Sacagawea, also Sakakawea or Sacajawea, was a Lemhi Shoshone woman who helped the Lewis and Clark Expedition achieve each of its chartered mission objectives exploring the Louisiana Purchase. With the expedition, between 1804 and 1806, she...

Lord Byron was an English poet and a leading figure in the Romantic movement. Among Byron's best-known works are the lengthy narrative poems Don Juan and Childe Harold's Pilgrimage and the short lyric She Walks in Beauty. He is regarded as...

Augustin-Jean Fresnel was a French civil engineer and physicist whose research in optics led to the almost unanimous acceptance of the wave theory of light, excluding any remnant of Newton's corpuscular theory, from the late 1830s until the...

The Infante Carlos of Spain was the second surviving son of King Charles IV of Spain and of his wife, Maria Luisa of Parma. As Carlos V he was the first of the Carlist claimants to the throne of Spain. He is often referred to simply as 'Don...

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...

Christian Jürgensen Thomsen was a Danish antiquarian who developed early archaeological techniques and methods. In 1816 he was appointed head of 'antiquarian' collections which later developed into the National Museum of Denmark in Copen...

The Constitution of the United States is the supreme law of the United States of America. The Constitution, originally comprising seven articles, delineates the national frame of government. Its first three articles entrench the doctrine of...

The Storming of the Bastille in Paris occurred on 14 July 1789. While the medieval fortress and prison known as the Bastille contained only seven prisoners, its fall was the flashpoint of the French Revolution and it subsequently become an...

The French Revolution was a period of radical social and political upheaval in France from 1789 to 1799 that profoundly affected French and modern history, marking the decline of powerful monarchies and churches and the rise of democracy an...

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...

Lieutenant-General Sir Henry Pottinger was an Anglo-Irish soldier and colonial administrator who became the first Governor of Hong Kong (1843-1844). Pottinger accepted Foreign Secretary Lord Palmerston's offer of the post of envoy and pl...

Mary Wollstonecraft discusses how women are to be kept ignorant of all knowledge and only to be valued for their physical charms (almost every ad on TV/in print). The examples of her contemporaries that she quotes are frighteningly familiar...

The White House is the official residence and workplace of the president of the United States. It is located at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW in Washington, D.C., and has been the residence of every U.S. president since John Adams in 1800. Th...

Anyone who has studied ancient Egypt will be familiar with Jean Francois Champollion, The Father of Egyptology. He was, after all, credited with deciphering hieroglyphics from the Rosetta Stone and thus giving scholars the key to understand...

Jules Sébastien César Dumont d'Urville was a French explorer, naval officer and rear admiral, who explored the south and western Pacific, Australia, New Zealand and Antarctica. In honour of his many valuable chartings, the D'Urville Sea...