Modern readers must jump through a number of hoops to enjoy this legendary novel. Written between 1816 and 1818, this is very much a novel of its era, and both language and ideas about plot are quite different from those of today. That asid...

Tewodros II was Emperor of Ethiopia from 1855 until his death in 1868. He was born Kassa Hailegiorgis (English: "restitution" and "His [or the] power"). His rule is often placed as the beginning of modern Ethiopia, ending the decentralized...

Karl Ernst Adolf Anderssen was a German chess master. He is considered to have been the world's leading chess player for much of the 1850s and 1860s. He was quite soundly defeated by Paul Morphy who toured Europe in 1858, but Morphy retired...

Alexander II was the Emperor (tsar) of Russia from 1855 until his assassination. He was also the Grand Duke of Finland. He was born the eldest son of Nicholas I of Russia and Charlotte of Prussia, daughter of Frederick William III of Prussi...

Karl Heinrich Marx was a German philosopher, economist, sociologist, historian, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. Marx's work in economics laid the basis for the current understanding of labour and its relation to capital, and has in...

James Prescott Joule was an English physicist and brewer, born in Salford, Lancashire. Joule studied the nature of heat, and discovered its relationship to mechanical work. This led to the law of conservation of energy, which led to the dev...

Frederick Douglass was an American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman. After escaping from slavery, he became a leader of the abolitionist movement, gaining note for his dazzling oratory and incisive antislavery writing. He stood...

Ivanhoe was the first of Scott's novels to take place in the middle ages but it is far from being the fantastic, medievalist romance associated (in the critical imagination) with a visionary Britain that never was. This is the first novel i...

A short story by Washington Irving, Rip Van Winkle tells the tale of a lazy old man who falls asleep for twenty years and returns to his village to find that the world has changed drastically during his absence and that nearly everyone he k...

Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, later The Prince Consort was the husband of Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. He was born in the Saxon duchy of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld to a family connected to many o...

Léon Foucault was a French physicist best known for the invention of the Foucault pendulum, a device demonstrating the effect of the Earth's rotation. He also made an early measurement of the speed of light, invented the gyroscope, and disc...

Roger Fenton was a pioneering British photographer, one of the first war photographers and known for his Crimean War photographs. It is likely that in autumn 1854, as the war grabbed the attention of the British public, that some powerfu...

Carlos Manuel de Céspedes del Castillo was a Cuban planter who freed his slaves and made the declaration of Cuban independence in 1868 which started the Ten Years' War. Céspedes was a landowner and lawyer in eastern Cuba, near Bayamo, wh...

Jean Désiré Gustave Courbet was a French painter who led the Realist movement in 19th-century French painting. The Realist movement bridged the Romantic movement (characterized by the paintings of Théodore Géricault and Eugène Delacroix), w...

Jacques Offenbach is best known for his opera Les contes d'Hoffman (Tales of Hoffmann) and for a work he did not compose, Gaîté parisienne, which used his themes as assembled and arranged by Manuel Rosenthal. Offenbach was one of those popu...