People

In-depth guides that start simply enough for children and go deep enough for researchers.

91 articles

• History · 1780–1781Túpac Amaru IITúpac Amaru II was an Indigenous Andean leader of Inca descent who in 1780 launched the largest uprising against Spanish colonial rule in 18th-century Spanish America, and who was executed in Cusco in 1781 together with his wife and fellow leader Micaela Bastidas.Map
• Philosophy · 1787–1797Mary WollstonecraftMary Wollstonecraft was an English writer and philosopher of the late eighteenth century whose book A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) argued that women only seemed less capable than men because they were denied a real education, making her one of the founders of feminist thought.Map
• History · 1788–1813BennelongWoollarawarre Bennelong (c. 1764–1813) was a Wangal man of the Sydney Harbour region who, after being kidnapped by the first British colonists, became the most prominent Aboriginal go-between of early colonial New South Wales, travelled to England and back, and spent his last years leading a community of his own people on the Parramatta River.Map
• Philosophy · 1801–1836Jeong Yak-yong (Dasan)Jeong Yak-yong (1762–1836), known by his pen name Dasan, was a Korean scholar, official and engineer of the late Joseon dynasty who, during eighteen years of exile, wrote hundreds of volumes on how government, law and learning could better serve ordinary people.Map
• History · 1804–1817Usman dan FodioUsman dan Fodio (1754–1817) was a Fulani Muslim scholar, preacher and poet from the Hausa kingdom of Gobir, in what is now northern Nigeria, whose reform movement turned into a jihad in 1804 and created the Sokoto Caliphate, one of the largest states in nineteenth-century Africa.Map
• Philosophy · 1807–1831Georg Wilhelm Friedrich HegelHegel was a German philosopher (1770–1831) who argued that human thinking, societies and freedom grow and change through history, and that we can only understand an idea by seeing how it developed.Map
• Literature · 1811–1817Jane AustenJane Austen (1775–1817) was an English novelist who wrote witty stories about families, friendship, money and marriage, and whose books, such as Pride and Prejudice, are still read and filmed all over the world.Map
• Literature · 1839–1908Machado de AssisMachado de Assis (1839–1908) was a Brazilian writer of mixed African and Portuguese descent who grew up poor in Rio de Janeiro, was largely self-educated, became the first president of the Brazilian Academy of Letters, and wrote ironic, playful novels such as The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas and Dom Casmurro that are now read around the world.Map
• Literature · 1846–1881Fyodor DostoevskyFyodor Dostoevsky was a Russian novelist of the 1800s who survived a fake execution and years of prison in Siberia, and then wrote gripping novels such as Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov about guilt, freedom, faith and what it means to be a good person.Map
• Philosophy · 1872–1889Friedrich NietzscheFriedrich Nietzsche was a nineteenth-century philosopher who asked a daring question: if people stopped believing the old answers about right and wrong, how could they still find life worth living and make something great of it?Map
• Literature · 1890–1941Rabindranath TagoreRabindranath Tagore was a poet, songwriter, storyteller, painter and teacher from Bengal in India who, in 1913, became the first person from outside Europe to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.Map
• History · 1898–1911Marie CurieMarie Curie was a Polish-born physicist and chemist working in Paris who showed that radioactivity comes from inside atoms, discovered the elements polonium and radium with her husband Pierre, and became the first woman to win a Nobel Prize and the only person to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences.Map
• Literature · 1905–1916Natsume SōsekiNatsume Sōseki was a Japanese novelist of the early 1900s who wrote funny and sad books about how people felt lonely, proud and confused while their country was changing very fast.Map
• Literature · 1912–1924Franz KafkaFranz Kafka was a writer from Prague, working quietly in an insurance office by day, whose strange and dreamlike stories about people trapped by rules they cannot understand became some of the most famous books of the twentieth century.Map
• Literature · 1915–1941Virginia WoolfVirginia Woolf was an English writer who invented new ways of writing novels that follow the flow of people’s thoughts and memories, and who argued that women need money and a room of their own to be able to write.Map
• Literature · 1918–1936Lu XunLu Xun (魯迅, 1881–1936), the pen name of Zhou Shuren, was a Chinese writer, often called the father of modern Chinese literature, who gave up studying medicine to “heal” his country with words and wrote the short stories “Diary of a Madman” (1918) and “The True Story of Ah Q” (1921–22) as well as hundreds of sharp, sad and funny essays.Map
• Literature · 1921–1945Langston HughesLangston Hughes was an African American poet and writer from Harlem, New York, who wrote about the everyday lives, hopes and struggles of Black Americans in words that sound like blues and jazz music.Map
• Art · 1922–1953Diego RiveraDiego Rivera (born December 8, 1886, in Guanajuato; died November 24, 1957, in Mexico City) was a Mexican painter whose enormous wall paintings, or murals, told the history and everyday life of Mexico’s people on the walls of public buildings and helped make Mexican muralism one of the most influential art movements of the twentieth century.Map
• Art · 1925–1954Frida KahloFrida Kahlo was a Mexican painter who, after a terrible accident left her in pain for the rest of her life, painted honest, colourful pictures of herself, her body, her feelings and her country.Map