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...

Johann Gottfried Galle was a German astronomer at the Berlin Observatory who, with the assistance of student Heinrich Louis d'Arrest, was the first person to view the planet Neptune, and know what he was looking at, on 23 September, 1846. H...

The Battle of Leipzig or Battle of the Nations was fought by the coalition armies of Russia, Prussia, Austria, and Sweden led by the Russian Czar Alexander I against the French army of Napoleon I, Emperor of the French, at Leipzig, Saxony....

Søren Aabye Kierkegaard was a profound and prolific writer in the Danish "golden age" of intellectual and artistic activity. His work crosses the boundaries of philosophy, theology, psychology, literary criticism, devotional literature and...

John Snow, Physician, reformer. During the cholera epidemics of the late 1840s and early 1850s, physician John Snow realized that cholera is transmitted through contaminated water. His essay, "On the Mode of Communication of Cholera" was fi...

David Livingstone was a Scottish Congregationalist pioneer medical missionary and an explorer in Africa. His meeting with H. M. Stanley gave rise to the popular quotation, "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?" Perhaps one of the most popular nat...

Wilhelm Richard Wagner was a German composer, theatre director, polemicist, and conductor who is primarily known for his operas (or, as some of his later works were later known, "music dramas"). Unlike most opera composers, Wagner wrote bot...