Robert O'Hara Burke was an Irish soldier and police officer, who achieved fame as an Australian explorer. He was the leader of the ill-fated Burke and Wills expedition, which was the first expedition to cross Australia from south to north,...

Victor Emmanuel II was the King of Piedmont, Savoy and Sardinia from 1849–1861. On February 18, 1861, he assumed the title as King of Italy to become the first king of a united Italy, a title he held till his death in 1878. The Italians gav...

Henri Vieuxtemps was a Belgian violinist and composer. He was a child prodigy and one of the most important composers of violin music in the latter-nineteenth century. He was an innovator within the Romantic movement, though he was not alwa...

Multatuli is the pseudonym of Eduard Douwes Dekker (1820-1887). After 18 years of civil service in the Dutch East Indies, he returned to Europe in 1856 a disillusioned man. The way the natives were treated by their own as well as by the Du...

William Tecumseh Sherman was an American soldier, businessman, educator and author. He served as a General in the Union Army during the American Civil War (1861–65), for which he received recognition for his outstanding command of military...

Friedrich Engels was a German social scientist, author, political theorist, philosopher, and father of Marxist theory, alongside Karl Marx. In 1845 he published The Condition of the Working Class in England, based on personal observatio...

Herbert Spencer was an English philosopher, prominent classical liberal political theorist, and sociological theorist of the Victorian era. Spencer developed an all-embracing conception of evolution as the progressive development of the phy...

Florence Nightingale was an English social reformer and statistician, and the founder of modern nursing. Nightingale came to prominence while serving as a manager of nurses trained by her during the Crimean War, where she organised the t...

Pellegrino Artusi was the author of famous Italian cookbook La scienza in cucina e l'arte di mangiare bene (The Science of Cooking and the Art of Eating Well). Artusi was born in Forlimpopoli, a town near Forlì, and made his fortune as a si...

The Greek War of Independence, also known as the Greek Revolution was a successful war of independence waged by the Greek revolutionaries between 1821 and 1832 against the Ottoman Empire. The Greeks were later assisted by the Russian Empire...

Charles Pierre Baudelaire was a French poet who also produced notable work as an essayist, art critic, and pioneering translator of Edgar Allan Poe. His most famous work, Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil), expresses the changing na...

Nathan Bedford Forrest was a lieutenant general in the Confederate Army during the American Civil War. He is remembered both as a self-educated, innovative cavalry leader during the war and as a leading southern advocate in the postwar year...

Gustave Flauber, French novelist. Flaubert is regarded as one of the supreme masters of the realistic novel. He was a scrupulous, slow writer, intent on the exact word (le mot juste) and complete objectivity. The son of a surgeon, he studie...

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky was a Russian writer of novels, short stories and essays. Dostoyevsky's literary works explore human psychology in the troubled political, social and spiritual context of 19th-century Russian society. A Slavo...

Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton KCMG FRGS was a British geographer, explorer, translator, writer, soldier, orientalist, cartographer, ethnologist, spy, linguist, poet, fencer and diplomat. He was known for his travels and explorations wi...