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Margaret Thatcher
Margaret Thatcher was born Margaret Roberts. She studied chemistry at Oxford University and later became a barrister. Having been elected to Parliament in 1959 she gained her first cabinet post as the Minister for Education in 1970. She became the...
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Duke Ellington
Duke Ellington (1899-1974) was an American jazz composer, orchestra leader, and pianist, who created the single most durable body of original jazz compositions and shaped the most distinctive and resourceful large jazz orchestra. Edward Kennedy...
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Vivien Leigh
Vivien Leigh was a British actress, whose most memorable success was as Scarlett O'Hara in the film Gone With the Wind (1939). The ironic result is that audiences still tend to associate Miss Leigh with that spoiled little spitfire heroine and fail...
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Alfred Einstein
Alfred Einstein (1880-1952) was a German-American musicologist. A second cousin of Albert Einstein, he was born in Munich, Germany, on December 30, 1880, He received his doctorate in music from the University of Munich in 1903. While serving as...
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Frits Zernike
Frits Zernike, born in Amsterdam, July 16, 1888 was a Dutch physicist. Educated at Amsterdam and Groningen, he joined the staff of Groningen University in 1913 as an assistant in astronomy, became professor of theoretical physics and mechanics in...
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Ferdinand Canning Scott Schiller
Ferdinand Canning Scott Schiller was an English philosopher, who was a leading English pragmatist. Schiller was born in Ottensen, near Hamburg, Germany on August 16 1864. Educated in England at Rugby and Oxford University's Balliol College, he was...
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Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, born in Rocken, Prussia (now in East Germany) in October 15, 1844, was a German philosopher. Nietzsche stressed the importance of individualism and intuitive thought against the dominant philosophical trend of his day,...
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Robert Browne
Robert Browne, (1550-1633), founder of the Brownists, born at Tolethorpe, near Stamford. Educated at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, he was for a time a schoolmaster. He took orders, but his licence to preach was revoked when he began to attack...
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Pierre Navarre
Pierre Navarre born in Detroit, Michigan, March 28, 1790, was an American fur trader and scout in the War of 1812 When Navarre was a child his family moved to the River Raisin country, and about the year 1807 he and his elder brother Robert built'...
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Charles Franklin Kettering
Charles Franklin Kettering, born near Loudonville, Ohio, August 29, 1876, was an American engineer and inventor: Graduating as an engineer from Ohio State University in 1904, he joined the National Cash Register Company at Dayton, becoming chief of...
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Arthur Pendragon (King Arthur)
In the 19th century the legends of Arthur and his knights again became fashionable. In 1858 William Morris published his poem 'Defence of Guinevere,' and the tales provided the Pre-Raphaelite painters with subjects. Most famous of all were Lord Tennyson's Idylls of the King, a series of connected...
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Harman Blennerhassett
Harman Blennerhassett (1765-1831) was an American adventurer, who, with Aaron Burr, was accused of treason. He was born in Hampshire, England, on October 8, 1765. Educated at Trinity College, Dublin, he was admitted to the bar in Ireland in 1790,...
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Jean Sylvain Bailly
Jean Sylvain Bailly (1736-1793) was a French astronomer, legislator, and historian. He was born in Paris on September 15, 1736. He studied painting but devoted himself to poetry and belles-lettres until he became acquainted with the astronomer...
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William Henry Perkin
Sir William Henry Perkin (1838-1907) was an English chemist, who founded the synthetic dye industry and stimulated the development of synthetic organic chemistry. Perkin was born in London on March 12, 1838. In his school days, he was fired to...
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Ferdinand von Zeppelin
Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin was a German airship builder. Born in Constance (Konstanz), Germany, July 8, 1838; d. Charlottenburg, March 8, 1917. The son of a titled Wiirttemberg court official, he attended the Ludwigsburg Military Academy and the...
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Edward Youmans
Edward Livingston Youmans was an American science editor. Born in Coeymans, N.Y. on June 3, 1821. From his father, a mechanic and farmer, he received an interest in practical science that stayed with him throughout his entire life; but an attack of...
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Liberty Hyde Bailey
Liberty Hyde Bailey was an American botanist and educator. Born South Haven, Michigan, March 15, 1858. Bailey, whose boyhood was spent on a frontier farm, went from a one-room school to study botany at Michigan Agricultural College. After...
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Thomas Cavendish
Thomas Cavendish (1560-1592) was an English buccaneer and the third circumnavigator of the globe. He was born near Harwich, in southeastern England. Having squandered his inheritance at court, Cavendish hoped to recoup his losses by highjacking the...
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Donato Bramante
Donate Bramante (1444-1514) was an Italian architect, who evolved a classical style of monumental grandeur that is the embodiment of the architectural ideals of the high Renaissance. He was bom at Monte Asdruvaldo, near Urbino, and began his career...
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Edward Lawrie Tatum
Edward Lawrie Tatum was a American geneticist and biochemist, who shared the 1958 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine with two other American geneticists, George W. Beadle and Joshua Lederberg. Tatum helped to establish some of the basic...
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Henry Harley Arnold
Henry Harley Arnold (1886-1950) was an American air force officer. As commanding general of the U.S. Army Air Forces during World War II, he was one of the most important military men of that period, in charge of nearly 2,500,000 men and over 75,000...
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Lavrentiy Beria
Lavrentiy Beria (1899-1953), Soviet political leader and official in the secret police during the Stalin era. He was born in Merkheuli, Georgia, on March 29, 1899. Educated as an architectural engineer, he joined the Bolshevik (Communist) party in...
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Sergei Eisenstein
Sergei Eisenstein (1898-1948) was a Russian film director and theoretician, whose work (always controversial, always powerful, and always experimental) had an incalculable influence on the development of the cinema. Eisenstein was born in Riga,...
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Euclides da Cunha
Euclides da Cunha (1866-1909) was a Brazilian writer, who wrote Os sertoes, a non-fiction work that is considered one of Brazil's literary classics. Euclides da Cunha was born on Jan. 20, 1866, in Santa Rita do Rio Negro, municipality of Cantagalo....
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Giorgio Vasari
Giorgio Vasari was an Italian painter, architect and art writer. Born in Arezzo, Tuscany on July 30, 1511 He studied under Luca Signorelli, Michelangelo and Andrea del Sarto. The Cardinal Ippolito de Medici, Pope Clement VII and the Dukes...
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Johann Friedrich Herbart
Johann Friedrich Herbart was a German philosopher, psychologist, and educator. Born Oldenburg, Germany, May 4, 1776. Herbart, one of the first important educational psychologists, had a great influence on education in Germany and in the United...
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Milton Stover Eisenhower
Milton Eisenhower was an American educator and public official. He served as president of three universities and, in the late 1960's, as chairman of a presidential commission on the prevention of violence. He was a younger brother of General Dwight...
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Frank Robinson
Frank Robinson was an American baseball player and manager, who became the first black manager of a major league baseball team. His selection as pilot of the Cleveland Indians, announced in October 1974, followed an outstanding 19-year major league...
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Thomas Elyot
Sir Thomas Elyot (1490-1546), was an English diplomat and scholar, who propagated various Renaissance ideas in his native language. The son of Sir Richard Elyot, judge of common pleas, he accompanied his father as clerk of assize on the western...
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William Bainbridge
William Bainbridge (1774-1833) was an American naval officer who held commands in the Tripolitan War and the War of 1812. He was born in Princeton, N.J., on May 7, 1774. Entering the merchant service at the age of 15, Bainbridge was made captain...
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Charles Lyell
Sir Charles Lyell was a Scottish geologist, who revived and developed James Hutton's notion of uniformitarianism in geology.
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Anton Rubinstein
Anton Gregor Rubinstein was a Russian composer and pianist. Born in Wechwotynez, November 28, 1829. His parents were Jewish and soon after his birth removed to Moscow. His mother, being a good musician, was his first teacher; he next studied with...
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Clark Gable
Clark Gable (1901-1960) was an American film actor, often called "The King" because of his enduring popularity. "I'm no actor and never have been," Gable once said. "What people see on the screen is me." What audiences saw was an extremely handsome...
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Alexander Bain
Alexander Bain was a Scottish philosopher, psychologist, and educator. He was one of the principal developers of associationism. This psychological theory holds that all of man's knowledge comes from connections, or associations, that the mind makes from individual sense perceptions. Bain...
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Edvard Munch
Edvard Munch (1863-1944) was Norway's greatest painter and graphic artist, whose work was a major source of inspiration for modern expressionism. He was born in Loten on December 12, 1863, the son of a doctor in a poor district. He studied and...
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Alexander Scriabin
Aleksandr Nikolayevich Scriabin (1872-1915) was a Russian composer. He was born in Moscow on Jan. 6, 1872. After musical studies in Moscow, he went on a European tour in 1895-1896, playing mostly his own Chopinesque piano pieces. His fame as a...
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Francis Bacon
Francis Bacon, (1561-1626), was an English statesman, thinker, and writer. Unlike most philosophers of his time, he understood the importance of a scientific approach to knowledge. He urged that men should not form theories or; any subject until...
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Grimm Brothers
The Grimm brothers were German philologists and famous collectors of fairy tales. Jakob Grimm, born Hanau, Germany, Jan. 4, 1785; died Berlin, Germany, Sept. 20, 1863. Wilhelm Grimm, born Hanau, Feb. 24, 1786; died Berlin, Dec. 16, 1859. The Grimm...
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Hank Aaron
Hank Aaron was an American baseball player, who in 1974 eclipsed Babe Ruth's lifetime record of 714 major league home runs. Hank Aaron was born in Mobile, Ala., on Feb. 5, 1934. In 1952, after a few weeks with a barnstorming black baseball team, he...
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Herblock
Herbert Lawrence Block (October 13, 1909 – October 7, 2001) was an American cartoonist, known as Herblock, celebrated for the boldness of his draftsmanship and the incisiveness of his political satire. He was born in Chicago on Oct. 13, 1909,...
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Marlon Brando
Marlon Brando (1924-2004)), American actor who achieved stardom at the age of 23 with his powerful portrayal of Stanley Kowalslci in Tennessee Williams' play A Streetcar Named Desire. He was born in Omaha, Nebraska, on April 3, 1924. A nonconformist...
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Louis Bouche
Louis Bouche (1896-1969) was an American painter, who made a reputation first as a muralist, then as a painter of realistic scenes of daily life in American cities and small towns. His loose brushwork and bright colors are in the French...
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Marilyn Monroe
Marilyn Moroe (1926-1962) was an American film star, whose scarred and insecure life, amid worldwide adulation, ended tragically with her suicide. She was born to unwed parents in Los Angeles, Calif., on June 1, 1926, and was called Norma Jean...
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Roscoe Conkling
Roscoe Conkling (1829-1888) was an American lawyer and public official. He was born in Albany, N. Y., on October 30, 1829, the son of Alfred Conkling, a distinguished lawyer, judge, and author of several legal studies. Conkling attended school in...
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Mikhail Botvinnik
Mikhail Moiseyevich Botvinnik (1911-1995) was a Russian chess grand master and world champion. He won the USSR tide seven times, beginning in 1931, and was world chess champion for most of the period from 1948 to 1963. (He lost to Vassili Smyslov of...
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James Henry Breasted
James Henry Breasted (1865-1935) was an American Egyptologist and archaeologist. He was born in Rockford, Ill., on August 27, 1865. He attended Chicago Theological Seminary, but his interest in the study of Semitic languages persuaded him to abandon...
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Edme Bouchardon
Edme Bouchardon (1698-1762) was a French sculptor, noted for his public monuments in Paris. His works, based on long study of antique art, are decidedly academic, even neoclassical. He helped to break the dominance of the ornate rococo style and to...
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Birgit Nilsson
Birgit Nilsson (1918-2005), Swedish soprano, who is regarded as one of the greatest modern interpreters of such roles in the operas of Richard Wagner as Isolde in Tristan und Isolde and Briinnhilde in Die Walkiire and in Die Gotterdammerung. Her...
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William Colgate
William Colgate (1783-1857) was an American manufacturer and philanthropist, who founded what became Colgate-Palmolive Co., a giant of the soap and perfumery industry. He was born in Hollingbourne, England, on Jan. 25, 1783. His family moved to the...
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René Clair
Rene Clair (1898-1981), French film director, who is regarded as the master of French screen comedy between World Wars I and II. He was born Rene Chomette, in Paris on Nov. 11, 1898. After trying journalism, film acting, and editing, he turned to...
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Johns Hopkins
Johns Hopkins (1795-1873), American merchant, banker, and philanthropist, who founded a hospital and a university, in Baltimore, Md., that bear his name. He was born in Anne Arundel county, Maryland, on May 19, 1795, the second of 11 children of...
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Al Jolson
Al Jolson was an American singer and actor. Born Asa Yoelson, at St. Petersburg, Russia, May 26, 1886. Died San Francisco, California, Oct. 23, 1950. Jolson was one of the most exciting theatrical performers of his time. His unique singing style...
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Bing Crosby
Bing Crosby, real name Harry Lillis Crosby (1904-77) was an American US singer, actor, and television and radio performer, born in Tacoma, Washington. He attended Gonzaga University but left, before graduating, to become a vocalist with a dance...
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Alfred Hitchcock
Alfred Hitchcock was an English film and television director, whose more than 50 feature films, many of them made in Hollywood, won him the title "Master of Suspense." Born in London on August 13, 1899, Hitchcock had a strict Roman Catholic...
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Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre
Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre, (1787-1851), French painter and inventor of the daguerreotype, born at Cormeilles, Seina-et-Oise. He became an artist, and with Pierre Prevost executed a number of panoramic views. In 1822 he established a pictorial...
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Wyatt Earp
Wyatt Earp, born Monmouth, Ill, March 10, 1848. Died Los Angeles, California, January 13, 1929. Earp was a stagecoach driver and a buffalo hunter before beginning his career as a law enforcement officer in the West. He acted as deputy marshal in...
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Amelia Earhart
Amelia Mary Earhart, American aviator. Born Atchison, Kansas, July 24, 1898. Lost and presumed dead near Howland Island, in the Pacific Ocean, early July 1937. Amelia Earhart was the first woman to make a solo flight across the Atlantic Ocean. She...
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Benny Goodman
Benny Goodman was an American clarinetist and band leader. Born Benjamin David Goodman, at Chicago, Illnois, May 30, 1909. Goodman introduced a new kind of jazz, known as swing. In contrast with previous jazz styles his swing compositions were...
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Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, English author. Born Edinburgh, Scotland, May 22, 18S9. Died Crowborough, England, July 7, 1930. Doyle created Sherlock Holmes, the most famous detective in English fiction and one of the best-known characters in all English...
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George Eastman
George Eastman was am American inventor and philanthropist. Born Waterville, N.Y., July 12, 1854. Died Rochester, N.Y., March 14, 1932. Eastman revolutionized photography by making it possible for inexperienced amateurs to take pictures. In 1880 he...
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Robert Wilhelm Bunsen
Robert Wilhelm Bunsen (1811-99), German chemist and physicist, born at Gottingen, where he pursued his early studies, afterwards completing them at Paris, Berlin, and Vienna. In 1836 he became professor of chemistry at the Polytechnic Institute of...
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Agatha Christie
Agatha Christie (1891-1975), English novelist, born at Torquay. She was educated privately and in Paris. In 1914 she married Archibald Christie, and during the First World War worked in a Torquay hospital. In 1920 she wrote her first detective...
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Catiline
Catiline was a Roman soldier and politician. Born Rome, about 108 B.C. Catiline was named governor of Africa in 67 B.C. When he returned to Rome the following year, he was disqualified as a candidate for the consulship on charges, never proved, of...
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Pontius Pilate
Pontius Pilate was the Roman governor of Judaea from 26 A.D. to 36 A.D. Little is known of the origins or early life of Pilate. In 26 A.D. he was appointed procurator, or governor, of Judaea by the Roman emperor Tiberius. Information about Pilate's...
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Alaric
Alaric was the King of the Visigoths and the first Germanic leader to capture Rome. Born Peuce, an island at the mouth of the Danube River, about 370 A.D. Died Cosentia (now Cosenza), Italy, 410 A.D. After serving as an officer in the Roman army,...
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Boudica
Boadicea led a rebellion against the Romans in Britain about A.D. 60, and captured a number of towns. Boadicea, whose name is also spelled Boudicca and Boudica, was the wife of Prasutagus, king of the Iceni, a British tribe in the first century. The...
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Damocles
Damocles was a courtier of Dionysius the Elder, tyrant of Syracuse from 406 B.C. to 367 B.C. Damocles expressed to Dionysius the opinion that such wealth and power as the tyrant possessed must bring great happiness. Dionysius devised a means of...
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Isocrates
Isocrates, Greek orator and educator. Born Athens, Greece, 436 B.C. Died Athens, 338 B.C. Isocrates is famous for his prose style, which is characterized by smoothness, balanced structure, and the use of periodic sentences. His style was imitated by...
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Miltiades
Athenian general who beat the Persians in the Battle of Marathon. He later unsuccssfully attacked the island of Paros, in an attempt to regain control of the Aegean.
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Pyrrhus
Ruler of Epirus, in north-west Greece, He sided with the town of Tarentum in Sicily against Rome in 280 BC, and in 279 won a victory at Heraclea at such a cost that he is said to have remarked that another such victory would destroy him - hence the phrase 'pyrrhic victory'.
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David Hume
David Hume (1711-1776) Scottish man of letters and philosopher, who brought his common-sense skepticism to the subject of metaphysics. Hume concluded that it was impossible to establish certain knowledge through reason. Men had only their experience...
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Arthur Wellesley - 1st Duke of Wellington
One of the greatest generals in British history, and also a prominent politician. Wellington won a high military reputation in campaigns in India, and secured a place in history as one of its greatest generals through his long and arduous struggle...
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Donatello
Born Donate di Niccolo di Betto Bardi, at Florence, Italy, about 1386, better known as Donatello, was an Italian sculptor. Donatello was the greatest Italian sculptor of the early part of the 15th century and one of the most important artists of the...
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Emile Durkheim
Emile Durkheim,(1858-1917) French philosopher and sociologist, who with Karl Marx and Max Weber was one of the three most profoundly influential analysts of industrial society. Durkheim concentrated on clearly observable human behavior and applied...
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Julia Ward Howe
Julia Ward Howe, American writer, lecturer, and social reformer. Born New York, N.Y., May 27, 1819. Julia Ward Howe is best known for writing the words for The Battle Hymn of the Republic, the rallying song for Union Army troops during the Civil...
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David Ross Locke
David Ross Locke, American political satirist and journalist. Born Vestal, N.Y., September 20, 1833. Locke is remembered for the fiercely ironic attacks he made on slavery through the letters of his literary creation, the Rev. Petroleum V. Nasby. He...
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Llewelyn the Great
Llewelyn the Great (died 1240), Prince of North Wales and son of Iorwerth. His father was expelled from Wales, but Llewelyn recovered the country in 1194. In 1206 he married the illegitimate daughter of King John, but later supported the barons...
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David Lloyd George
David Lloyd George, 1st Earl Lloyd-George of Dwyfor (1863-1945), British statesman. After practicing as a solicitor, he entered Parliament in 1890 as Liberal member for Caernarvon, which constituency he represented for 54 years. He first became...
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Charles F Kettering
Charles Franklin Kettering, American engineer and inventor. Born near Loudonville, Ohio, Aug. 29, 1876. Kettering is probably best known as the inventor of the automobile self-starter, which was introduced on the 1911 Cadillac. At about the same...
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Charles Darwin
Charles Robert Darwin (1809-1882) was a distinguished scientist whose Origin of Species first clearly formulated and elaborated the theory of evolution. His first work (1897) described a five year cruise in the Beagle which the British Government...
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Norman Bethune
Norman Bethune was a Canadian surgeon who became a national hero in China because of his medical service with the Red Army. Born Henry Norman Bethune, in Gravenhurst, Ontario, Canada, March 1890. Upon the outbreak of World War I in 1914, Bethune...
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Booker T Washington
Booker Taliaferro Washington,(1856-1915), US educator and reformer, born a slave in Franklin County, Virginia. After emancipation he went with his family to West Virginia. He attended a school for Negroes, and in 1892 went to the Hampton Normal and...
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Cary Grant
Cary Grant was an American motion picture actor, who in a career spanning more than 30 years has been one of Hollywood's most accomplished performers in sophisticated comedy. He was born Archibald Alexander Leach in Bristol, England, on January 18,...
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Rob Roy
Rob Roy is a celebrated Scottish outlaw. Born Robert MacGregor, at Buchanan parish, Loch Lomond, Scotland, March 7, 1671. Died Balquhidder, Scotland, December 28, 1734. When the Stuart King James II was deposed in 1688, he granted Rob Roy, a...
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Alfred Adler
Alfred Adler, Austrian psychiatrist, born Vienna, Austria, February 7, 1870. Died Aberdeen, Scotland, May 28, 1937. Adler was a general physician in Vienna before starting to work with Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, in 1902. In 1911,...
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Babe Ruth
Babe Ruth was an American baseball player. Born George Herman Ruth, at Baltimore, Md., February 6, 1895. Died New York, N.Y., August 16, 1948. Known as the Sultan of Swat and the Bambino, Babe Ruth was the greatest crowd attraction in baseball and...
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Bram Stoker
Bram Stoker, British author. Born Dublin, Ireland, 1847. Died London, England, Apr. 21, 1912. Stoker wrote Dracula, a story about a vampire who feeds on human blood. Since its publication in 1897, Dracula has become known as one of the great horror...
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Sir Norman Lockyer
Sir (Joseph) Norman Lockyer (1836-1920), British astronomer, born at Rugby, and educated privately and on the Continent. In 1857 he became a civil servant in the War Office but his reputation as an outstanding amateur astronomer led to his transfer...
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William Caslon
William Caslon was an English type designer. Born Cradley, Worcestershire, England, 1692. Died London, England, January 23, 1766. Caslon designed several typefaces which are still used extensively by printers. By minimizing the decorative aspects of...
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Stephan Lochner
Stephan Lochner, German painter. Born Meersburg, Germany, about 1400. Died Cologne, Germany, 1451. Lochner was one of the greatest of the early German painters. He is known as the master of Cologne because his paintings are outstanding examples of...