Heinrich Louis d'Arrest was a German astronomer, born in Berlin. While still a student at the University of Berlin, d'Arrest was party to Johann Gottfried Galle's search for Neptune. On September 23, 1846, he suggested that a recently drawn...

Gregor Johann Mendel was a Austrian priest and scientist, and is often called the father of genetics for his study of the inheritance of traits in pea plants. Mendel showed that the inheritance of traits follows particular laws, which were...

Ulysses S. Grant, 18th President of the United States (1869-1877), is best known as the Union general who led the North to victory over the Confederate South during the American Civil War. As a President, however, he has long been dismissed...

Heinrich Schliemann was a German businessman and a pioneer in the field of archaeology. He was an advocate of the historicity of places mentioned in the works of Homer and an archaeological excavator of Hissarlik, now presumed to be the sit...

The policies of Rutherford B. Hayes, America's nineteenth President (1877-1881), began to heal the nation after the ravages of the Civil War. He was well suited to the task, having earned a steadfast reputation for integrity throughout his...

Louis Pasteur was a French biologist, microbiologist and chemist renowned for his discoveries of the principles of vaccination, microbial fermentation and pasteurization. He is remembered for his remarkable breakthroughs in the causes and p...

Jean Joseph Étienne Lenoir was a Belgian engineer who developed the internal combustion engine in 1859. Prior designs for such engines were patented as early as 1807, but none were commercially successful. Lenoir's engine was commercialized...

Frederick Law Olmsted was an American landscape architect, journalist, social critic, and public administrator. He is popularly considered to be the father of American landscape architecture. Olmsted was famous for co-designing many well-kn...

Red Cloud was a war leader and the head Chief of the Oglala Lakota (Sioux). His reign was from 1868 to 1909. One of the most capable Native American opponents the United States Army faced, he led a successful conflict in 1866–1868 known as...

Sir Francis Galton, half-cousin of Charles Darwin, was an English Victorian polymath, anthropologist, eugenicist, tropical explorer, geographer, inventor, meteorologist, proto-geneticist, psychometrician, and statistician. He was knighted i...

The Anti-Slavery Society or A.S.S. was the everyday name of two different British organizations. The first was founded in 1823 and was committed to the abolition of slavery in the British Empire. Its official name was the Society for the Mi...

Alfred Russel Wallace was a British naturalist, explorer, geographer, anthropologist, and biologist. He is best known for independently conceiving the theory of evolution through natural selection; his paper on the subject was jointly publi...

Gustav Robert Kirchhoff was a German physicist who contributed to the fundamental understanding of electrical circuits, spectroscopy, and the emission of black-body radiation by heated objects. He coined the term black-body radiation in...

Anton Bruckner was an Austrian composer. Bruckner's reputation is based on his symphonies, masses, and motets. The symphonies are often considered emblematic of the final stage of Austro-German Romanticism, due to their rich harmonic langua...

John Kerr was a Scottish physicist and a pioneer in the field of electro-optics. He is best known for the discovery of what is now called the Kerr effect. Kerr's most important experimental work was the discovery of double refraction in...