Theo van Doesburg was a Dutch artist, practicing in painting, writing, poetry and architecture. He is best known as the founder and leader of De Stijl. Although he considered himself to be a modern painter at that time, his early work is in...

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...

Benito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini was an Italian politician, journalist, and leader of the National Fascist Party, ruling the country as Prime Minister from 1922 until his ousting in 1943. He ruled constitutionally until 1925, when he droppe...

Anton Webern was an Austrian composer and conductor. He was a member of the so called Second Viennese School. As a student and significant follower of Arnold Schoenberg, he became one of the best-known proponents of the twelve-tone techniqu...

John Maynard Keynes was a British economist whose ideas fundamentally changed the theory and practice of macroeconomics and the economic policies of governments. He built on and greatly refined earlier work on the causes of business cycles,...

Walter Adolph Gropius was a German architect and founder of Bauhaus. He studied architecture in Munich and worked in the office of Peter Behrens in Berlin. In 1910 he formed a partnership with Adolf Meyer. The following year he designed the...

Morihei Ueshiba was a famous martial artist and founder of the Japanese martial art of aikido. He is often referred to as Kaiso, meaning "founder", or Osensei, "Great Teacher". Ueshiba is remembered by his pupils as a master of the marti...

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...

Karl Marx and Frederich Engels' "Manifesto of the Communist Party" (its original title) was written as a pamphlet for the International Workingmen's Association. At the time the association was the most leftward in Europe, and involved itse...

Influenced by the Impressionists’ experimentation with color, Post-Impressionist painter Georges Seurat worked with innovative techniques. On an enormous canvas, the artist depicted city dwellers gathered at a park on La Grande Jatte (liter...

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...

Yevgeny Ivanovich Zamyatin, sometimes anglicized as Eugene Zamyatin, was a Russian author of science fiction and political satire. He is most famous for his 1921 novel We, a story set in a dystopian future police state. Despite having be...

Hideki Tojo was a general of the Imperial Japanese Army (IJA), the leader of the Imperial Rule Assistance Association, and the 27th Prime Minister of Japan during much of World War II, from October 17, 1941, to July 22, 1944. As Prime Minis...

Anna Eleanor Roosevelt was First Lady of the United States from 1933 to 1945. She supported the New Deal policies of her husband, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and assumed a role as an advocate for civil rights. After her husband's death...

Édouard Daladier was a French Radical-Socialist (centre-left) politician and the Prime Minister of France at the outbreak of World War II. Daladier was born in Carpentras and began his political career before World War I. During the war,...