Louis Braille was a French educator and inventor of a system of reading and writing for use by the blind or visually impaired. His system remains virtually unchanged to this day, and is known worldwide simply as braille. Blinded in both...

Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol was a Ukrainian-born Russian dramatist, novelist and short story writer. Considered by his contemporaries one of the preeminent figures of the natural school of Russian literary realism, later critics have found in...

Abraham Lincoln, the 16th president of the United States (1861-1865), guided his country through the most devastating experience in its national history-the CIVIL WAR (1861-1865). He is considered by many historians to have been the greates...

Kit Carson was an American frontiersman. He was a mountain man (fur trapper), wilderness guide, Indian agent, and U.S. Army officer. Carson became a frontier legend in his own lifetime via biographies and news articles. Exaggerated versions...

Charles Robert Darwin was an English naturalist who realised and presented compelling evidence that all species of life have evolved over time from common ancestors, through the process he called natural selection. The fact that evolution o...

Georges-Eugène Haussmann, commonly known as Baron Haussmann was the Prefect of the Seine Department in France, who was chosen by the Emperor Napoleon III to carry out a massive program of new boulevards, parks and public works in Paris, com...

Alfred Tennyson was Poet Laureate of Great Britain and Ireland during much of Queen Victoria's reign and remains one of the most popular British poets. Tennyson excelled at penning short lyrics, such as "Break, Break, Break", "The Charge...

William Ewart Gladstone was a British Liberal Party statesman and four times Prime Minister (1868–74, 1880–85, 1886 and 1892–94). He was a champion of the Home Rule Bill which would have established self-government in Ireland. Gladstone...

The Argentine War of Independence was fought from 1810 to 1818 by Argentine patriotic forces under Manuel Belgrano, Juan José Castelli and José de San Martín against royalist forces loyal to the Spanish crown. On July 9, 1816, an assembly m...

The Mexican War of Independence was an armed conflict between the people of Mexico and the Spanish colonial authorities which started on September 16, 1810. The movement, which became known as the Mexican War of Independence, was led by Mex...

The Venezuelan War of Independence (1810–1823) was one of the Spanish American wars of independence of the early nineteenth century, when independence movements in Latin America fought against rule by the Spanish Empire, emboldened by Spain...

The Chilean War of Independence was a war between pro-independence Chilean criollos seeking political and economic independence from Spain and royalist criollos supporting continued allegiance to the Captaincy General of Chile and membershi...

Frédéric François Chopin was a Polish composer and virtuoso pianist of the Romantic era who wrote primarily for the solo piano. He gained and has maintained renown worldwide as a leading musician of his era, whose "poetic genius was based o...

In 1834 Schumann founded a music journal, the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik; he was its editor and leading writer for ten years. He was a brilliant and perceptive critic: his writings embody the most progressive aspects of musical thinking in...

Camillo Benso, Count of Cavour, was a leading figure in the movement toward Italian unification. He was the founder of the original Italian Liberal Party and Prime Minister of the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia, a position he maintained (exce...