Born in Ontario and educated at McGill University, Dr. James Naismith invented the game of basketball in a YMCA gymnasium in Springfield, Mass., and developed basketball’s original 13 rules Author of ...

Abraham Stoker was born near Dublin, Ireland, graduating from Trinity College with honours in mathematics. In 1872, Stoker published his first melodrama, The Crystal Cup, a dream fantasy. While ...

Eldest son of Queen Victoria and Albert, Prince Consort, Albert Edward was king of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and of the British dominions and emperor of India from 1901.

William Penn Adair Rogers was educated early in his life mostly at Indian territory schools. He began his show career in 1902, when he was "The Cherokee Kid" with Texas Jack’s Wild West Show in South ...

William Byron, 5th Baron, succeeded to the title upon the death of his father on August 8, 1736. A Lieutenant in the Royal Navy from 1738, he was constituted Master of the Royal Staghounds from ...

"Life is a great and noble calling, not a mean and grovelling thing to be shuffled through as best we can, but a lofty and exalted destiny." Forty-eighth Imam of the Shia Ismaili Muslims, Sultan ...

Born into a Catholic family at Gurtrue, County Cork County Cork, Ireland, Ronayne claimed in his autobiography to have taught school in 1849. He renounced Catholicism in 1851, graduating the same year ...

Born in Dublin, Swift took religious orders in 1694 and was appointed Dean of Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin in 1713. Author of such social satires as Gulliver’s Travels (1726) and A Modest ...

In an address delivered in a San Francisco masonic hall in 1913, Russell made positive use of masonic imagery by saying, "Now, I am a free and accepted mason. I trust we all are. But not just after ...

Founder of the Red Cross, a founder of the Young Men’s Christian Association, and co-winner of the first Nobel Prize for Peace in 1901, he also worked to bring about the 1864 Geneva Convention. In Un ...

Burton was an English scholar-explorer and author of 43 volumes on his explorations and almost 30 volumes of translations, including an unexpurgated 16-volume translation of The Arabian Nights ...

Born Erich Weiss, Harry Houdini was a world famous escape artist and trapeze performer, as well as the inventor of the diving suit, and the first successful aviator in Australia. Houdini was not alone ...