Johan August Strindberg was a Swedish playwright, novelist, and essayist. A prolific writer who often drew directly on his personal experience, Strindberg's career spanned four decades, during which time wrote over 60 plays and more than 30...

Sir Horace Lamb was an English applied mathematician and author of several influential texts on classical physics, among them Hydrodynamics (1895) and Dynamical Theory of Sound (1910). Both of these books remain in print. The word vorticity...

Ivan Petrovich Pavlov was a Russian physiologist known primarily for his work in classical conditioning. From his childhood days Pavlov demonstrated intellectual curiosity along with an unusual energy which he referred to as "the instinc...

The Taiping Rebellion (or Rebellion of Great Peace) was a large-scale revolt against the authority and forces of the Qing Government in China. It was conducted from 1850 to 1864 by an army and civil administration led by heterodox Christian...

Henri René Albert Guy de Maupassant was a French writer, remembered as a master of the short story form, and as a representative of the naturalist school of writers, who depicted human lives and destinies and social forces in disillusioned...

Robert Louis Stevenson was born in Edinburgh’s New Town in 1850. He died 44 years later on a small Samoan island in the Pacific. During his short life he travelled the world, defied convention, and made himself one of the most famous writer...

Cut Nyak Dhien or Tjoet Nja' Dhien was a leader of the Acehnese guerrilla forces during the Aceh War. Following the death of her husband Teuku Umar, she led guerrilla actions against the Dutch for 25 years. She was posthumously awarded the...

Anténor Firmin was a Haitian anthropologist, journalist, and politician. Firmin is best known for his book De l'Égalité des Races Humaines (English: On the Equality of Human Races), which was published as a rebuttal to French writer Count A...

Daniel Elmer Salmon was a veterinary surgeon. He earned the first D.V.M. degree awarded in the United States, and spent his career studying animal diseases for the U.S. Department of Agriculture. He gave his name to the Salmonella genus of...

Field Marshal Horatio Herbert Kitchener, 1st Earl Kitchener, was an Irish-born British Field Marshal and proconsul who won fame for his imperial campaigns and later played a central role in the early part of the First World War, although he...

César Ritz was a famous Swiss hotelier and founder of several hotels, most famously the Hôtel Ritz, in Paris and The Ritz Hotel in London. His nickname was "king of hoteliers, and hotelier to kings," and it is from his name and that of his...

Moby Dick belongs to the first rank of world literature. Melville read widely and deeply within the Western tradition, and brought it all together in his complex masterpiece. Within the framework of a simple tale of obsession, Melville offe...

John Henry "Doc" Holliday was an American gambler, gunfighter, and dentist, and a good friend of Wyatt Earp. He is best known for his role as a temporary deputy marshal in the events leading up to and following the Gunfight at the O.K. Corr...

Charles Henry Dow was an American journalist who co-founded Dow Jones & Company with Edward Jones and Charles Bergstresser. Dow also founded The Wall Street Journal, which has become one of the most respected financial publications in the w...

Sir Arthur John Evans was a British archaeologist most famous for unearthing the palace of Knossos on the Greek island of Crete at Kephala Hill and for developing the concept of "Minoan civilization" from the structures and artifacts there...