Sir Henry Creswicke Rawlinson, 1st Baronet GCB was an English soldier, diplomat and orientalist. He is sometimes referred to as the "Father of Assyriology." Knowledge of cuneiform was lost until 1835 when Henry Rawlinson, a British East Ind...

William George Armstrong, 1st Baron Armstrong CB, FRS was an effective Tyneside industrialist who founded the Armstrong Whitworth manufacturing empire. Armstrong was responsible for developing the hydraulic accumulator. Where water press...

The Peruvian War of Independence was a series of military conflicts beginning in 1811 that culminated in the proclamation of the independence of Peru by José de San Martín on July 28, 1821. During the previous decade Peru had been a strongh...

Napoléon François Charles Joseph Bonaparte, Prince Imperial, King of Rome, known in the Austrian court as Franz from 1814 onward, Duke of Reichstadt from 1818, was the son of Napoleon I, Emperor of the French, and his second wife, Archduche...

Elisha Graves Otis was an American industrialist, founder of the Otis Elevator Company, and inventor of a safety device that prevents elevators from falling if the hoisting cable fails. At the age of 40, while he was cleaning up the fact...

Urbain Jean Joseph Le Verrier was a French mathematician who, beginning in 1838, studied the causes of perturbations in the Solar System. His work led to improved knowledge of the masses of the planets, the scale of the Solar System, and th...

Jón Sigurðsson was the leader of the 19th century Icelandic independence movement. Born at Hrafnseyri, near Arnarfjörður in the Westfjords area of Iceland, he was the son of a pastor, Sigurður Jónsson. He moved to Copenhagen, Denmark, in 18...

August Gottfried Ritter was a German romantic composer and organist. Co-creator, together with Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy, of the first example of Romantic Organ Sonata (the first one was composed in 1845); he moved in 1847 from being orga...

Franz Liszt was a prolific 19th-century Hungarian composer, virtuoso pianist, conductor, music teacher, arranger, organist, philanthropist, author, nationalist and a Franciscan tertiary. Liszt gained renown in Europe during the early nin...

Harriet Beecher Stowe was an American abolitionist and author. Her novel Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) was a depiction of life for African-Americans under slavery; it reached millions as a novel and play, and became influential in the United Sta...

The Battle of Borodino, fought on September 7, 1812, was the largest and bloodiest single-day action of the French invasion of Russia and all Napoleonic Wars, involving more than 250,000 troops and resulting in at least 70,000 casualties. T...

The American War of 1812 to 1815, was fought between the United States and the British Empire, on land in North America and at sea. The United States, which declared war and attacked British colonies and shipping first, ended the war withou...

Charles Dickens was an English writer and social critic. He created some of the world's most memorable fictional characters and is generally regarded as the greatest novelist of the Victorian period. During his life, his works enjoyed unpre...

English poet Robert Browning was born in a suburb of London on May 7, 1812. He wrote his first book of poetry at the age of twelve, and was fluent in four languages by the age of fourteen. At sixteen, he began his studies at University Coll...

Ivan Alexandrovich Goncharov was a Russian novelist best known for his novels A Common Story (1847), Oblomov (1859), and The Precipice (1869). He also served in many official capacities, including the position of censor. Goncharov was bo...