Lucie Simplice Camille Benoît Desmoulins was a journalist and politician who played an important role in the French Revolution. He was a childhood friend of Maximilien Robespierre and a close friend and political ally of Georges Danton, who...

August Wilhelm Antonius Graf Neidhardt von Gneisenau was a Prussian field marshal. He was a prominent figure in the reform of the Prussian military and the War of Liberation. With Blücher, Gneisenau served in the capture of Paris; his mi...

Akbar Shah II, also known as Akbar II or Mirza Akbar, was the second-to-last of the Mughal emperors of India. He held the title from 1806 to 1837. He was the second son of Shah Alam II and the father of Bahadur Shah Zafar II. Akbar had l...

Luigi Cherubini was an Italian Classical and Romantic composer. His most significant compositions are operas and sacred music. Beethoven regarded Cherubini as the greatest of his contemporaries. His operas were heavily praised and interpret...

Richard Colley Wesley, 1st Marquess Wellesley, was an Irish and British politician and colonial administrator. He first made his name as Governor-General of India between 1798 and 1805 and later served as Foreign Secretary in the British Ca...

Thomas Clarkson was an English abolitionist, and a leading campaigner against the slave trade in the British Empire. He helped found The Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade and helped achieve passage of the Slave Trade Ac...

Katsushika Hokusai was a Japanese artist, ukiyo-e painter and printmaker of the Edo period. In his time, he was Japan's leading expert on Chinese painting. Born in Edo (now Tokyo), Hokusai is best-known as author of the woodblock print seri...

Selim III, Ottoman sultan (1789-1807), nephew and successor of Abd al-Hamid I to the throne of the Ottoman Empire (Turkey). He suffered severe defeats in the second of the Russo-Turkish Wars with Catherine II, but suffered no major territor...

Anna Maria "Marie" Tussaud was a French artist known for her wax sculptures and Madame Tussauds, the wax museum she founded in London. In 1835, after 33 years touring Britain, she established her first permanent exhibition in Baker Stre...

Revolutionary in its own time and controversial to this day, this work is a permanent classic of political theory and a key source of democratic belief. Rousseau's concepts of "the general will" as a mode of self-interest uniting for a comm...

This work by Jean Jacques Rousseau probably represents the single greatest work in defining what we would call education today. I am a Francophone living in Northern Ontario and so I have read just the french version, but barring that I bel...

George IV was the king of Hanover and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland from the death of his father, George III, on 29 January 1820 until his own death ten years later. From 1811 until his accession, he served as Prince Regen...

Gijsbert Karel, Count van Hogendorp was a conservative Dutch statesman. He was part of the Driemanschap (Triumvirate) that invited William I of the Netherlands to become Prince of the new independent Netherlands in 1813. He served as Prime...

Joséphine de Beauharnais was the first wife of Napoleon I, and thus the first Empress of the French. Her first husband Alexandre de Beauharnais was guillotined during the Reign of Terror, and she was imprisoned in the Carmes prison until...

Lieutenant Colonel James Achilles Kirkpatrick was the British Resident in Hyderabad from 1798 to 1805. He also built the historic Koti Residency in Hyderabad, a landmark and major tourist attraction. He married a local Hyderabadi noblewoman...