The Tunguska event, or Tunguska explosion, was a powerful explosion that occurred not far from the Podkamennaya (Lower Stony) Tunguska River in what is now Krasnoyarsk Krai in Russia, at 00:13:35 Greenwich Mean Time (around 07:14 local time...

Claude Lévi-Strauss is a French anthropologist who developed structuralism as a method of understanding human society and culture. Outside anthropology, his works have had a large influence on contemporary thought, in particular on the prac...

Joseph Raymond McCarthy was a Republican U.S. Senator from the state of Wisconsin between 1947 and 1957. Beginning in 1950, McCarthy became the most visible public face of a period of extreme anti-communist suspicion inspired by the tension...

Lyndon B. Johnson. Thirty-Sixth President 1963-1969. "A Great Society" for the American people and their fellow men elsewhere was the vision of Lyndon B. Johnson. In his first years of office he obtained passage of one of the most extensive...

Simone de Beauvoir was a French writer, intellectual, existentialist philosopher, political activist, feminist and social theorist. Though she did not consider herself a philosopher, she had a significant influence on both feminist existent...

Olivier Messiaen was a French composer, organist and ornithologist, widely regarded as one of the major composers of the 20th century. His music is rhythmically complex (he was interested in rhythms from ancient Greek and from Hindu sources...

Regarded as one of the greatest photographers of his time, Henri Cartier-Bresson was a shy Frenchman who elevated "snap shooting" to the level of a refined and disciplined art. His sharp-shooter’s ability to catch "the decisive moment," his...

Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow were notorious outlaws, robbers and criminals who travelled the Central United States during the Great Depression. Their exploits were known nationwide. They captured the attention of the American press and it...

Marinus (Rinus) van der Lubbe was a Dutch council communist convicted of, and executed for, setting fire to the German Reichstag building on 27 February 1933, an event known as the Reichstag fire. According to the Berlin police, van der...

James Agee (1909) Agee was an American novelist, screenwriter, journalist, poet, and film critic who worked for Fortune, Time, and The Nation. His first major book, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, a commentary on the life of tenant farmers i...

Fleming is the creator of the fictional superspy James Bond. Bond is a suave, lady-killing British agent who travels the globe, battles super-villains bent on world domination, and famously prefers his vodka martinis "shaken, not stirred."...

Edwin Herbert Land was a American scientist, inventor, and industrialist. While studying physics at Harvard in the 1920s he became interested in the polarization of light. He developed a new polarizing material, which he called Polaroid, an...

Clarence Leonidas "Leo" Fender was an American inventor who founded Fender Electric Instrument Manufacturing Company, or "Fender" for short. He left the company in the late 1960s, and later founded two other musical instrument companies, Mu...

Irish-British painter. He lived in Berlin and Paris before settling in London (1929) to begin a career as an interior decorator. With no formal art training, he started painting, drawing, and participating in gallery exhibitions, with littl...

Max Miedinger was a Swiss typeface designer. He was famous for creating the Neue Haas Grotesk typeface in 1957 that was renamed Helvetica in 1960. Marketed as a symbol of cutting-edge Swiss technology, Helvetica achieved immediate global su...