Russian-born American poet Joseph Brodsky was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1987 for his important lyric and elegiac poems.
1940-1994
Charlemagne was the founder of the Carolingian Empire, best known for uniting Western Europe for the first time since the fall of the Roman Empire.
742-814
1803-1890
English admiral Sir Francis Drake circumnavigated the globe in 1577-1578, helped defeat the Spanish Armada and was the most renowned seaman of the Elizabethan era.
1540-1596
1903-1991
Henry VIII, king of England, was famously married six times and played a critical role in the English Reformation, turning his country into a Protestant nation.
1491-1547
Anthropologist and novelist Zora Neale Hurston was a fixture of the Harlem Renaissance before writing her masterwork, Their Eyes Were Watching God.
1891-1960
Richard Loeb, of Leopold and Loeb, is best known for murdering 14-year old Bobby Franks with Nathan Leopold in an attempt to carry out the 'perfect crime'.
1905-1936
High school teacher Christa McAuliffe was the first American civilian selected to go into space. She died in the space shuttle Challenger’s explosion in 1986.
1948-1986
William Butler Yeats was one of the greatest English-language poets of the 20th century and received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923.
1865-1939