Definitions

John Tyler (1790-1862) was an American lawyer and politician who served as the tenth president of the United States. His presidency was a tumultuous one – initially elected as vice president, he came to office after the death of his predecessor...

John Brown (1800-1859) was a militant abolitionist best known for the part he played in the violence of Bleeding Kansas (1854-1859) and his raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia (now in West Virginia) in October 1859. Brown developed an intense...

William Henry Harrison (1773-1841) was an American statesman and military general who served as the ninth president of the United States. A member of the distinguished Harrison family of Virginia, he built his reputation as a war hero after...

Aethelstan was the first King of England, ruling from 927 to 939. The son of Edward the Elder (reign 899-924) and grandson of Alfred the Great (reign 871-899), he inherited the southern-based Kingdom of the Anglo-Saxons in 924 before capturing...

Tsar Nicholas II (reign 1894-1917) was the last of the Romanov emperors, murdered along with his family during the turmoil of the Russian Revolution in 1917. Insisting on maintaining as far as possible the autocratic rule begun by his ancestors...

Italy occupied Ethiopia for five years, from 1935 to 1941, following a mass-scale invasion launched by the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini (1883-1945). However, Ethiopia had been a long-aimed colonial objective of Italy, which had already...

Cleopatra of Macedon (355/4-308 BCE), daughter of Philip II of Macedon (reign 359-336 BCE) and his Molossian queen, Olympias of Epirus (c. 375-316 BCE), was the only full sister of Alexander the Great (reign 336-323 BCE). Born in Pella, the...

The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, signed on 3 March 1918, outlined the harsh conditions under which the crumbling Russian Empire withdrew from the First World War (1914-18). Negotiated by Vladimir Lenin (1870-1924), the leader of Soviet Russia...

Bleeding Kansas' was a term coined by the New York Tribune in 1856, referring to the escalating hostilities in the Kansas Territory between pro-slavery activists and anti-slavery 'free staters' following the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska...

Henry Clay (1777-1852) was an American lawyer and statesman, one of the defining political figures of his age. Over the course of his several decades on the stage of national politics, Clay helped lead the United States into the War of 1812...