Charles Grey, 2nd Earl Grey, known as Viscount Howick between 1806 and 1807, was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from November 1830 to July 1834. A member of the Whig Party, he was a long-time leader of multiple reform movements, mo...

Andrew Jackson was the seventh President of the United States (1829–1837). He was also military governor of Florida (1821), commander of the American forces at the Battle of New Orleans (1815), a founder of the modern Democratic Party, and...

Muhammad Ali Pasha, also known as Muhammad Ali of Egypt and the Sudan, was the Albanian Ottoman governor and the de facto ruler of Egypt from 1805 to 1848, who is considered the founder of modern Egypt. At the height of his rule, he control...

Ivan Nabokov was a Russian Adjutant general and general of infantry prominent during the Napoleonic wars. Nabokov came from an old noble family based in the Novgorod governorate, where his father general Alexander Nabokov was a landowner...

Georg Simon Ohm was a German physicist. As a high school teacher, Ohm began his research with the recently invented electrochemical cell, invented by Italian Count Alessandro Volta. Using equipment of his own creation, Ohm determined that t...

John Tyler, 10th President of the United States (1841-1845), signaled the last gasp of the Old Virginia aristocracy in the White House. Born a few years after the American Revolution in 1790 to an old family from Virginia's ruling class, Ty...

William I, also known as Wilhelm I, of the House of Hohenzollern was the King of Prussia (2 January 1861 – 9 March 1888) and the first German Emperor (18 January 1871 – 9 March 1888). Under the leadership of William and his Chancellor Otto...

Johann Strauss I was a Austrian violinist and composer of waltzes and other works, notably Redetzky March (1848). His son Johann (1825–1899), known as “the Younger,” is sometimes called “the Waltz King” and is best remembered for his nu...

Victorian poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning published her first poem in 1820, at the age of fourteen. In 1826, she published her first collection of poems, entitled "An Essay on Mind and Other Poems." In 1845, she met fellow poet Robert Brown...

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...

Napoléon François Charles Joseph Bonaparte, Prince Imperial, King of Rome, known in the Austrian court as Franz from 1814 onward, Duke of Reichstadt from 1818, was the son of Napoleon I, Emperor of the French, and his second wife, Archduche...

David Livingstone was a Scottish Congregationalist pioneer medical missionary and an explorer in Africa. His meeting with H. M. Stanley gave rise to the popular quotation, "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?" Perhaps one of the most popular nat...

Samuel Brannan was an American settler, businessman, journalist, and prominent Mormon who founded the California Star, the first newspaper in San Francisco, California. He is considered the first to publicize the California Gold Rush and wa...

Victor Emmanuel II was the King of Piedmont, Savoy and Sardinia from 1849–1861. On February 18, 1861, he assumed the title as King of Italy to become the first king of a united Italy, a title he held till his death in 1878. The Italians gav...

Multatuli is the pseudonym of Eduard Douwes Dekker (1820-1887). After 18 years of civil service in the Dutch East Indies, he returned to Europe in 1856 a disillusioned man. The way the natives were treated by their own as well as by the Du...