Duke Kahanamoku, known as the "Big Kahuna," was an Olympic champion swimmer who is generally credited with having invented the modern sport of surfing. He was the first person to be inducted into both the Swimming Hall of Fame and the Surfi...

Ho Chi Minh (meaning "Ho, Enlightened Will") was a Vietnamese revolutionary and statesman, who later became Prime Minister (1946 -1955) and President (1955 - 1969) of North Vietnam. He was a leading force in trying to re-unite North Vietna...

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...

Leader of the French resistance in WWII - A lifetime military man, de Gaulle was minister for National Defense and War in June, 1940 when France capitulated to Germany. DeGaulle escaped to Britain, where he made a famous broadcast calling o...

Sir William Lawrence Bragg was an Australian-born British physicist and X-ray crystallographer, discoverer (1912) of Bragg's law of X-ray diffraction, which is basic for the determination of crystal structure. He was joint recipient (with h...

Man Ray's photography would come to play an important role in the Surrealist movement. Although he had first bought a camera in 1915 to document his paintings, he now wanted to become a professional portrait photographer. Some of his very f...

From the 1920s until the 1970s Agatha Christie was the world's most popular mystery author, reportedly selling more than one billion books worldwide. While other mystery authors like Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett came and went, Chri...

Friedrich Anton Christian Lang was an Austrian-German-American film director, screenwriter and occasional film producer, one of the best known émigrés from Germany's school of Expressionism. His most famous films are the groundbreaking Metr...

Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov, Soviet politician and diplomat, was a leading figure in the Soviet government from the 1920s, when he rose to power as a protégé of Joseph Stalin, to the 1950s, when he was dismissed from office by Nikita Kh...

Gauguin's art has all the appearance of a flight from civilisation, of a search for new ways of life, more primitive, more real and more sincere. His break away from a solid middle-class world, abandoning family, children and job, his refus...

Erwin Johannes Eugen Rommel was one of the best known German Field Marshals and commander of the Deutsches Afrika Korps in World War II. He is also known by his nickname The Desert Fox (Wüstenfuchs). In a classic blitzkrieg, Allied force...

Sergei Prokofiev was one of the most prolific and celebrated Russian composers of the 20th century, Sergei Prokofiev is perhaps most famous for music he composed for the children's story Peter and the Wolf. He proved his talent as a pianist...

Sir James Chadwick was an English Nobel laureate in physics awarded for his discovery of the neutron. In 1932, Chadwick discovered a previously unknown particle in the atomic nucleus. This particle became known as the neutron because of...

Karl Dönitz was a German naval Commander who served in the Imperial German Navy during World War I, commanded the German submarine fleet during World War II, and eventually was given control of the entire German Navy (Kriegsmarine). In the...

Louis Victor Pierre Raymond de Broglie, duc de Broglie was a French physicist who made groundbreaking contributions to quantum theory. In his 1924 PhD thesis, he postulated the wave nature of electrons and suggested that all matter has wave...