Best Nineteenth Century
Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel was a nineteenth-century German astronomer renowned for his groundbreaking work in astrometry. He precisely measured the parallax of the star 61 Cygni in 1838, providing the first definitive evidence for stellar distances and revolutionizing astronomical calculations. This a...
Charles Garnier was a prominent French architect of the 19th century and a leading figure of the Beaux-Arts movement, celebrated for his opulent, heavily ornamented architectural style. He achieved international recognition after winning the design competition for the new Paris Opera house, which wa...
The Mary Celeste was an American-registered merchant brigantine discovered adrift and abandoned in the Atlantic Ocean near the Azores in December 1872. The ship, captained by Benjamin Briggs, was found with its cargo of denatured alcohol largely intact, but the lifeboat and the entire crew of ten we...
John Herschel was a nineteenth-century British astronomer renowned for his systematic surveys of the southern hemisphere’s celestial objects. His work, primarily conducted from South Africa, resulted in detailed catalogs of nebulae and star clusters. These observations significantly advanced our und...
Urbain Le Verrier was a nineteenth-century French astronomer renowned for his groundbreaking work in celestial mechanics. He accurately predicted the existence and location of Neptune by analyzing irregularities in Uranus’s orbit. His calculations provided strong evidence for the unseen planet and r...
The *Mary Celeste* was an American-registered merchant brigantine discovered adrift and abandoned in the Atlantic Ocean near the Azores on December 4, 1872. The ship was found with its cargo of denatured alcohol untouched and a six-month supply of food and water, yet the crew of ten and the captain'...
The Galena Historic District is a nationally recognized area in northwestern Illinois featuring significant nineteenth-century architecture. Primarily Federal, Greek Revival, and Italianate buildings demonstrate the district’s importance as a bustling river town during the Mississippi trade period....
Friedrich Georg Wilhelm von Struve was a prominent nineteenth-century Russian astronomer renowned for his meticulous work in astrometry, particularly concerning binary star systems. He developed advanced techniques for measuring stellar positions and distances. His contributions significantly shaped...
Pepita Jiménez is Juan Valera's 1874 Spanish novel, notable for opening in letters from seminarian Luis de Vargas before shifting to third-person narration.
James Renwick Jr. was an American architect best known for New York's Gothic Revival St. Patrick's Cathedral, begun in 1858.
Edward Emerson Barnard (1857–1923) was an American observational astronomer who joined the staff of Lick Observatory in California and later moved to Yerkes Observatory in Wisconsin. He discovered Jupiter's fifth moon, Amalthea, in 1892, the first Jovian satellite found since Galileo's time, and mea...
The Greenbrier Ghost is the alleged spirit of Zona Heaster Shue, whose reported 1897 appearance helped prompt a murder inquiry in West Virginia.
Maria Mitchell was an American astronomer who, in 1847, discovered a comet subsequently named "Miss Mitchell's Comet." This achievement earned her a gold medal prize from the King of Denmark and made her the first female professional astronomer in the United States. In 1865, she joined Vassar Colleg...
The Hermann Historic District in Hermann, Missouri, encompasses roughly 650 buildings and sites reflecting the city’s German heritage through distinctive architecture like Gothic Revival churches and timber-frame homes dating from the mid-19th century.
Johann Gottfried Galle (1812–1910) was a German astronomer who identified the planet Neptune on 23 September 1846 at the Berlin Observatory. Working from positional predictions sent by French mathematician Urbain Le Verrier, Galle and his assistant Heinrich d'Arrest located Neptune within one degree...
William Parsons, 3rd Earl of Rosse, was a 19th-century Anglo-Irish astronomer and telescope builder based at Birr Castle in Ireland. He constructed the Leviathan of Parsonstown, a reflecting telescope with a 72-inch metal mirror that remained exceptionally large for decades. Using it, he observed sp...
The Wild Irish Girl is Sydney Owenson's 1806 epistolary novel, notable for using an English visitor's romance to argue for Irish culture and identity.
Norman Lockyer was an English astronomer and science journalist who made significant discoveries in solar spectroscopy during the 19th century. In 1868, he independently co-discovered an unknown element in the Sun's spectrum, which he named helium after the Greek word for the sun. In addition to his...
Edward Walter Maunder was a British astronomer whose work at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, concentrated on sunspots and other solar phenomena. He documented a prolonged scarcity of observed sunspots between about 1645 and 1715, a period later named the Maunder Minimum. His research remains relev...
Seth Carlo Chandler was an American astronomer best known for identifying a periodic variation in the position of Earth's rotational axis. Announced in 1891 and now called the Chandler wobble, the motion has a period of roughly 433 days and contributes to changes in the location of the geographic po...
The Stark Munro Letters is Arthur Conan Doyle's 1895 epistolary novel, notable for drawing on his early medical career and debates over professional ethics.
The Ayrshire Legatees is John Galt's 1820 Scottish epistolary novel, notable for contrasting a family's London experiences with village life at home.
Annie Russell Maunder was an Irish-British astronomer known for her contributions to solar observation and sunspot research. Working at the Royal Greenwich Observatory, she developed the 1904 butterfly diagram, which plots sunspot latitudes over time to reveal their migration pattern during solar cy...
Benjamin Apthorp Gould was a prominent American astronomer who made significant contributions to the systematic mapping of the stars. He founded *The Astronomical Journal* in 1849 and later traveled to Argentina to direct the National Observatory at Córdoba, established in 1871. During his time in S...
Margaret Lindsay Huggins was an Irish-born astronomer who pioneered stellar spectroscopy with William Huggins and co-wrote an 1897 atlas of spectra.
