Claim OwnershipBiographics: History One Life at a Time
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© Biographics: History One Life at a Time
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For better of for worse these are the people who changed our world.
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11Over a century after he first appeared in movies, Charlie Chaplin’s name still conjures images of a funny little guy in a bowler hat causing mirth-inducing chaos. By some measures, his Little Tramp is the most famous character to have ever existed, a clown so beloved that not even Hitler stealing his mustache could ruin him for us.
His nickname is still known across the globe. Simon Bolivar, El Libertador (The Liberator), the man who almost single-handedly wrested South America from Spanish control. Without a doubt, he was one of the most important men who ever lived: a Latino George Washington, a general who could stand shoulder to shoulder with Napoleon. In his short life, he united all of modern Colombia, Venezuela, Panama, and Ecuador into a single superstate… and then lived long enough to see all his dreams turn to dust in the harsh daylight of independence.
Soldier, hero, exile, radical, general, dictator, man of the people, Simon Bolivar was many things. Yet outside Latin America, knowledge of his life is something most of us are sorely lacking. Today, we take you on a sweeping ride through the epic life of the man known to history as The Liberator.
He is the worldwide symbol of rebellion and revolutionary struggle. His silhouette is familiar to billions, representing the epitome of cool anti-establishmentism. Yet, few people know the real story behind the legend of Che Guevara. In this week’s Biographix, we discover the man behind the myth to reveal an individual whose passion for social justice saw no bounds.
Adolf Eichmann was a thin little man with bow legs and a hook nose. In the civilian world he had been viewed as of no account, a socially awkward loser with little to redeem himself. Having joined the Nazi party, however, his unquestioning commitment to orders coupled with his need for ruthless efficiency allowed him to carve out a career that see him go down as one of the greatest mass murderers in all of human history. In this week’s Biographics, we trace the life, crimes and death of Adolf Eichmann.
Christopher Columbus (c. 1451 to May 20, 1506) was an Italian explorer and navigator. In 1492, he sailed across the Atlantic Ocean from Spain in the Santa Maria, with the Pinta and the Niña ships alongside, hoping to find a new route to India.
Italian diplomat Niccolò Machiavelli lived over five centuries ago but his influence among unscrupulous politicians reaches into the modern age. He is mostly known for writing The Prince -- the handbook that established him as the "father of modern political theory." Through its teachings -- power is the ultimate goal through any means necessary.
Prince Rogers Nelson was an American singer-songwriter, musician, record producer, dancer, actor, and filmmaker. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest musicians of his generation. A multi-instrumentalist who was considered a guitar virtuoso, he was well known for his eclectic work across multiple genres, flamboyant and androgynous persona, and wide vocal range which included a far-reaching falsetto and high-pitched screams.
Charles I or Karl I was the last Emperor of Austria, the last King of Hungary, the last King of Bohemia, and the last monarch belonging to the House of Habsburg-Lorraine before the dissolution of Austria-Hungary.
Austrian-born British philosopher, regarded by many as the greatest philosopher of the 20th century. Wittgenstein’s two major works, Logisch-philosophische Abhandlung (1921; Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 1922) and Philosophische Untersuchungen (published posthumously in 1953; Philosophical Investigations), have inspired a vast secondary literature and have done much to shape subsequent developments in philosophy, especially within the analytic tradition. His charismatic personality has, in addition, exerted a powerful fascination upon artists, playwrights, poets, novelists, musicians, and even filmmakers, so that his fame has spread far beyond the confines of academic life.
Ginette Dior, better known as Catherine Dior, was a French Resistance fighter during World War II. Involved with the Franco-Polish intelligence unit F2 from November 1941, she was arrested in Paris in July 1944 by the Gestapo, then tortured and deported to the Ravensbrück women concentration camp.
Russian physiologist known chiefly for his development of the concept of the conditioned reflex. In a now-classic experiment, he trained a hungry dog to salivate at the sound of a metronome or buzzer, which was previously associated with the sight of food. He developed a similar conceptual approach, emphasizing the importance of conditioning, in his pioneering studies relating human behaviour to the nervous system. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1904 for his work on digestive secretions.
Born in Georgia in 1860, Jefferson Randolph Smith went west while still a young man, finding work as a cowboy in Texas. Smith eventually tired of the hard work and low wages offered by the cowboy life, though, and discovered that he could make more money with less effort by convincing gullible westerners to part with their cash in clever confidence games.
Edward Teach, better known as Blackbeard, was an English pirate who operated around the West Indies and the eastern coast of Britain's North American colonies.
In today’s video we are covering our first Saint worshipped both by the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches, revered for having first introduced Christianity amongst the Rus. These were a pagan people of Nordic descent, who ruled over a vast land in the early Middle Ages, from the Baltic to the Black Sea. But her holy title should not fool you, as she did not dedicate her life solely to prayer and converting the heathen. This Saint was a ruler, the regent of the Principality of Kiev, and one of the most powerful women of the early Middle Ages.
Norman Ernest Borlaug was an American agronomist who led initiatives worldwide that contributed to the extensive increases in agricultural production termed the Green Revolution.
Louis was the son of Louis XIII and his Spanish queen, Anne of Austria. He succeeded his father on May 14, 1643. At the age of four years and eight months, he was, according to the laws of the kingdom, not only the master but the owner of the bodies and property of 19 million subjects. Although he was saluted as “a visible divinity,” he was, nonetheless, a neglected child given over to the care of servants. He once narrowly escaped drowning in a pond because no one was watching him. Anne of Austria, who was to blame for this negligence, inspired him with a lasting fear of “crimes committed against God.”
Douglas Noel Adams was an English author, screenwriter, essayist, humorist, satirist and dramatist. Adams was author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which originated in 1978 as a BBC radio comedy before developing into a "trilogy" of five books that sold more than 15 million copies in his lifetime and generated a television series, several stage plays, comics, a video game, and in 2005 a feature film. Adams's contribution to UK radio is commemorated in The Radio Academy's Hall of Fame.
Alfred Russel Wallace was a British naturalist, explorer, geographer, anthropologist, biologist and illustrator. He is best known for independently conceiving the theory of evolution through natural selection; his paper on the subject was jointly published with some of Charles Darwin's writings in 1858. This prompted Darwin to publish On the Origin of Species.
Like Darwin, Wallace did extensive fieldwork; first in the Amazon River basin, and then in the Malay Archipelago, where he identified the faunal divide now termed the Wallace Line, which separates the Indonesian archipelago into two distinct parts: a western portion in which the animals are largely of Asian origin, and an eastern portion where the fauna reflect Australasia.
Without a doubt, one of the most exciting periods in history was the Industrial Revolution. At perhaps no other time was there a greater feeling that the sky was the limit. Innovations happened one after another and they all seemed destined to change the world forever.
Assuredly, one of the most important novelties of the 19th century was the railway. It marked a decisive shift in how people could travel the world. Distances that previously seemed unreachable were now just a day or two away. And we might have never enjoyed this revolution without George Stephenson, a man aptly named the “Father of the Railways.”
Today’s protagonist is universally recognised as one of the greatest science fiction writers in the history of literature. He won the Hugo and Nebula Awards, among many others, and is best remembered as the inventor of Robotics -- the brilliant mind that conceived the Foundation series and the concept of Psychohistory.
During his long writing career, Isaac Asimov hopped back and forth between science fiction and mystery novels, essays, non-fiction textbooks, literary commentaries and dissertations on humour. He authored or edited nearly 500 books in his lifetime, including an average of 10 or more publications every year during his most prolific production period.
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