Best 19th 20th Century
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Walter William Skeat (1835–1912) was a prominent English philologist who served as the Elrington and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at the University of Cambridge. He is best known for his 1882 *Etymological Dictionary of the English Language*, which became a foundational text for the historical...
Shimmura Izuru was a Japanese linguist and lexicographer recognized for his foundational work in documenting the Japanese language. He is best known for serving as the chief editor of the Kōjien, a standard, highly authoritative, and widely utilized Japanese dictionary first published by Iwanami Sho...
Marie Curie's research notebooks, which date to the late 19th and early 20th centuries, are historical scientific artifacts currently stored at the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris. Because her work with radium and polonium involved constant exposure to radioactive materials, the notebooks...
Ōtsuki Fumihiko was a prominent Japanese lexicographer and scholar of the English language during the Meiji era. He is best known for compiling the Genkai, or Sea of Words, a pioneering Japanese-language dictionary published in 1891. His work established new standards for dictionary compilation in J...
Ambrose Bierce was an American Civil War veteran, journalist, and author known for his cynical and macabre short stories. His most famous literary work is "The Devil's Dictionary," a satirical glossary originally published in book form in 1911 that offered sardonic definitions of English vocabulary....
Samuel Rolles Driver (1851–1914) was a prominent English theologian and Hebraist who spent his academic career at the University of Oxford. He is best known for co-authoring the Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew and English Lexicon, published in 1906, which remains a standard reference dictionary for bibli...
The Fabergé Imperial Easter eggs are jeweled objects commissioned by members of Russia's Romanov dynasty from the House of Fabergé between 1885 and 1916. Most were created as Easter gifts for the empresses and contain a concealed miniature or mechanical surprise, using materials such as gold, enamel...
Nicola Zingarelli was an Italian philologist, teacher, and lexicographer best known for creating one of the most widely used monolingual dictionaries in Italy. He first published his influential Vocabolario della lingua italiana in 1917, intending it primarily for educational use in schools. The dic...
Arthur Nikisch was a Hungarian-born conductor who lived from 1855 to 1922 and became an influential figure in European orchestral performance. He served simultaneously as principal conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic and music director of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra from 1895 until his death....
The Gates of Hell is a monumental sculptural portal that Auguste Rodin began in 1880 for a planned museum of decorative arts in Paris. Inspired primarily by Dante's Inferno, its crowded surface contains more than 180 figures, including compositions that later developed into independent works such as...
William Grant was a Scottish lexicographer best known for his foundational work in documenting the Scots language. He played a pivotal role in establishing the Scottish National Dictionary Association and served as the first editor of the Scottish National Dictionary from 1931 until his death. Prior...
Richard Willstätter (1872–1942) was a German chemist who received the 1915 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his investigations of plant pigments. He determined the molecular structure of chlorophyll, showing that it contains a central magnesium atom within a porphyrin ring, and distinguished between chl...
Aurobindo Ghosh (1872-1950) was an Indian nationalist, philosopher, and spiritual leader who played a significant role in India's independence movement before becoming one of the most influential spiritual philosophers of the 20th century. Educated in England, he returned to India and became involve...
Ricardo Flores Magón was a Mexican journalist, anarchist writer, and key figure in the early 20th-century Mexican Revolution. Through his newspaper "Regeneración," he heavily criticized the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz, advocating for the rights of indigenous people and the working class. His ideol...
Georgi Plekhanov was a Russian philosopher and revolutionary who is widely recognized as the father of Russian Marxism. In 1883, he co-founded the Emancipation of Labor group, which played a crucial role in translating and popularizing Marxist theory within the Russian Empire. Although instrumental...
Lala Lajpat Rai was an Indian independence activist, politician, and writer who played a pivotal role in the Indian National Congress during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He was a prominent part of the Lal Bal Pal triumvirate, advocating strongly for self-rule and Hindu nationalism. Rai is...
Francisco Ferrer was a Spanish radical educator and anarchist who founded the Escuela Moderna, a secular libertarian school, in Barcelona in 1901. The school promoted rationalist, anti-clerical education and inspired similar projects across Europe and the Americas. After the 1909 Tragic Week, Ferrer...
Bipin Chandra Pal was an Indian nationalist, writer, and prominent leader in the Indian independence movement. He was part of the "Lal Bal Pal" triumvirate alongside Lala Lajpat Rai and Bal Gangadhar Tilak, representing the extremist faction of the Indian National Congress. Pal was a vocal advocate...
Arthur Amos Noyes (1866–1936) was an American physical chemist who made significant contributions to the development of physical chemistry in the United States. He co-founded and directed the Research Laboratory of Physical Chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), establishing i...
Edward Douglass White was an American jurist who served on the United States Supreme Court from 1894 until his death in 1921, first as an associate justice and then, from 1910, as chief justice. President William Howard Taft made him the first sitting associate justice elevated directly to chief jus...
Georg Bredig was a German physical chemist recognized for his foundational work in catalysis and electrochemistry in the early 20th century. He is best known for developing the Bredig arc process, a method for producing colloidal metal solutions by striking an electric arc between metallic electrode...
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