Gioacchino Antonio Rossini was an Italian musical composer who wrote more than 30 operas as well as sacred music and chamber music. His best known works include Il barbiere di Siviglia (The Barber of Seville), and Guillaume Tell (William Te...

Stephen Fuller Austin, known as the "Father of Texas," led the Anglo-American colonization of the region. The capital city of Austin, Texas and Austin County, Texas, Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches, Texas as well as severa...

George Green was a British mathematical physicist who wrote An Essay on the Application of Mathematical Analysis to the Theories of Electricity and Magnetism (Green, 1828). The essay introduced several important concepts, among them a theor...

Dost Mohammad Khan was the founder of the Barakzai dynasty and one of the prominent rulers of Afghanistan during the First Anglo-Afghan War. With the decline of the Durrani dynasty, he became Emir of Afghanistan from 1826 to 1839 and then f...

Ferdinand I was Emperor of Austria, President of the German Confederation, King of Hungary and Bohemia (as Ferdinand V), as well as associated dominions from the death of his father, Francis II, Holy Roman Emperor, until his abdication afte...

Johann Ludwig Wilhelm Müller was a German lyric poet. He was educated at the gymnasium of his native town and at the University of Berlin, where he devoted himself to philological and historical studies. In 1813-1814 he took part, as a volu...

Matthew Calbraith Perry was a Commodore of the U.S. Navy and commanded a number of ships. He served in several wars, most notably in the Mexican-American War and the War of 1812. He played a leading role in the opening of Japan to the West...

John Keats was an English Romantic poet. He was one of the main figures of the second generation of Romantic poets, along with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, despite his works having been in publication for only four years before his...

Antonio José de Sucre y Alcalá, known as the "Gran Mariscal de Ayacucho" (English: "Grand Marshal of Ayacucho"), was a Venezuelan independence leader who served as the fourth President of Peru and the second President of Bolivia. Sucre was...

Louis-Charles Mahé de La Bourdonnais was a French chess master, possibly the strongest player in the early 19th century. La Bourdonnais was born on the island of La Réunion in the Indian Ocean in 1795. He learned chess in 1814 and began...

Under James Knox Polk,11th US President (1845-1849), the United States grew by more than a million square miles, across Texas and New Mexico to California and even Oregon. More than any other President, Polk exercised "Manifest Destiny," a...

Sir Thomas Theophilus Metcalfe, 4th Baronet, was an East India Company civil servant and agent of the Governor General of India at the imperial court of the Mughal Emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar. In 1830, Metcalfe began to build the "Metcalf...

Sir Charles Barry was an English architect, best known for his role in the rebuilding of the Palace of Westminster (also known as the Houses of Parliament) in London during the mid-19th century, but also responsible for numerous other build...

Grand Duchess Anna Pavlovna of Russia was a queen consort of the Netherlands. In the Netherlands, due to nineteenth century Dutch transliteration conventions, she is better known as Anna Paulowna. She was born as the eighth child and sixth...

Gabriel Lamé was a French mathematician who contributed to the theory of partial differential equations by the use of curvilinear coordinates, and the mathematical theory of elasticity. He became well known for his general theory of curv...