George Hendrik Breitner was a Dutch painter and photographer. He trained as a painter and draughtsman at the academy in The Hague. Although the Dutch painter Charles Rochussen taught the students history and landscape painting, Breitner's i...

William Howard Taft was an American politician, the twenty-seventh President of the United States (1909–1913), the tenth Chief Justice of the United States, a leader of the progressive conservative wing of the Republican Party in the early...

Sir Edward William Elgar, English composer. He received his training from his father, who was an organist, music seller, and amateur violinist. In 1885 he succeeded his father as organist of St. George's Church, Worcester. Imperial March, c...

Robert Stephenson Smyth Baden-Powell, 1st Baron Baden-Powell OM, GCMG, GCVO, KCB, also known as B-P, was a Lieutenant-General in the British Army, writer, and founder of the Scouting Movement. After having been educated at Charterhouse S...

Rudolf Christian Karl Diesel was a German inventor and mechanical engineer, famous for the invention of the diesel engine. Diesel engines are most often found in applications where a high torque requirement and low RPM requirement exist....

Theodore Roosevelt is mostly remembered as the twenty-sixth President of the United States (1901-1909), but this astonishingly multifaceted man was a great many other things as well. In addition to holding elective office as a New York S...

Giacomo Puccini was the most important composer of Italian opera after Verdi. He wrote in the verismo style, a counterpart to the movement of Realism in literature and a trend that favored subjects and characters from everyday life for oper...

Emmeline Pankhurst was a British political activist and leader of the British suffragette movement who helped women win the right to vote. In 1999 Time named Pankhurst as one of the 100 Most Important People of the 20th Century, stating "sh...

Selma Lagerlöf was a Swedish author and the first woman writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Known internationally for Nils Holgerssons underbara resa genom Sverige (a story for children, in the most common translation The Wonderful...

Max Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck was a German physicist who is considered to be the inventor of quantum theory. In 1899, he discovered a new fundamental constant, which is named Planck's constant, and is, for example, used to calculate the ener...

It's hard to talk about The Origin of Species without making statements that seem overwrought and fulsome. But it's true: this is indeed one of the most important and influential books ever written, and it is one of the very few groundbreak...

The Second War of Italian Independence, Franco-Austrian War, or Austro-Sardinian War was fought by Napoleon III of France and the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia against the Austrian Empire in 1859. In respect to the Italian unification proces...

Henry McCarty, also known as William H. Bonney, and known popularly as Billy the Kid, was an American Old West gunfighter who participated in New Mexico's Lincoln County War. He is known to have killed eight men. Before he started using...

Georges-Pierre Seurat was a French post-Impressionist painter and draftsman. He is noted for his innovative use of drawing media and for devising the painting techniques known as chromoluminarism and pointillism. Seurat's artistic personali...

Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle was a British writer best known for his detective fiction featuring the character Sherlock Holmes. Originally a physician, in 1887 he published A Study in Scarlet, the first of four novels about Holmes and Dr...