The American politician Benjamin Gratz Brown (1826-1885) served Missouri as senator and governor and gained national prominence in 1872 as the vice-presidential nominee on the Liberal Republican ticket. On May 28, 1826, B. Gratz Brown was ...

Bartholomew Augustine Santamaria (born 1915), a Roman Catholic publicist and organizer in Australia, founded the Catholic Social Movement. Bartholomew Santamaria was born in Brunswick, Victoria, on Aug. 14, 1915, the son of Italian immigra...

Pa Chin (Ba Jin) was the pen name of the Chinese author Li Fei-kan (born 1904). An idealist of humanitarian passion and revolutionary fervor, he was one of China's most prolific and beloved novelists of the 1930s and 1940s. Born into a lar...

George Herman Ruth, Jr. (1895-1948), American baseball player, was the sport's greatest celebrity and most enduring legend. George Herman Ruth was born on February 6, 1895, in Baltimore, one of eight children of a saloonkeeper. Judged as i...

Howard L. Bachrach's career achievments, including the National Medal of Science in 1983, relate to his pioneering research in the molecular biology of viruses. Bachrach was awarded the National Medal of Science for his work in molecular v...

The Reverend Thomas Bacon, one of colonial Maryland's most prolific authors, is remembered today primarily for his sermons on charity schools and the education of slaves, and for his compilation Laws of Maryland At Large ... (1765). In his...

George Frederick Baer (1842-1914) worked closely with legendary financier J. P. Morgan during American industry's most expansionary era. He headed the Philadelphia and Reading Railway Co., which carried coal from Morgan-owned coal mines in...

Po Chü-i (772-846) was a Chinese poet best known for his ballads and satirical poems. He held the view that good poetry should be readily understood by the common people and exemplified it in poems noted for simple diction, natural st...

Jacob Bailey was one of the most prolific writers in late-eighteenth-century North America and perhaps the finest practitioner of Hudibrastic verse satire after Samuel Butler himself. However, he published few of his works (a collection wa...

Irene Baird is an interesting and versatile writer, as her four very different novels testify. She is best known for her novel of social protest Waste Heritage (1939), which has been compared to John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men and The Gra...

Wambly Bald was well-known on the Left Bank of Paris as the writer of the weekly column "La Vie de Boheme (As Lived on the Left Bank)," which appeared in the Paris Tribune (the European edition of the Chicago Tribune ) from October 1929 to...

Baldur von Schirach was the youngest of several defendants tried for war crimes before an International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, Germany, after World War II. The former head of Nazi Germany's Hitler Youth organization received a sen...

José Ballivián (1805-1852) was a Bolivian patriot officer in the movement for independence from Spain, defended his country from invasion from Peru, and was president of Bolivia from 1841 to 1847. José Ballivián...

The German architect Balthasar Neumann (1687-1753) created some of the finest baroque buildings of the 18th century for the Schönborn family in central Germany, notably the Residenz in Würzburg and the church of Vierzehnheiligen....

Pan Ku (32-92) was a Chinese historian and man of letters. His name is mainly associated with the Han-shu, the standard history of the Western Han period. At the beginning of the Eastern Han dynasty (25-100) there existed no full historica...

Surendranath Banerjee (1848-1925) was a major figure in early Indian nationalism. A believer in moderate means, he was deeply committed to achieving constitutional objectives by constitutional methods. Surendranath Banerjee was born in Cal...

In 1989, Barbara Clementine Harris (born 1930) became the first woman bishop in the Worldwide Anglican Communion. Prior to this appointment, Harris was a noted social activist, and her views on social issues continue to inform her actions ...

Attorney Barbara Charline Jordan (1936-1996), who served in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1972 to 1976, was a prominent member of the House Judiciary Committee when it held President Richard M. Nixon's impeachment hearings. Barbar...

Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and journalist Barbara Tuchman (1912-1989) was best known for her works on 20th-century wars although she also wrote on 14th-century France. Barbara Tuchman was born in New York City on January 30, 1912, th...

Barber B. Conable, Jr. (born 1922), headed the most important lending institution committed to financing economic projects in developing countries, the World Bank, from 1986 to 1991. His tenure was noted for a complete overhaul of the bank...

Samuel Bard was a man of great prestige who helped further medical education in the United States. A well known physician in his own right, he helped to found the second medical school in America. Interested in many areas of science, he wr...

James Nelson Barker, an important early American playwright, was also a prominent political figure in Philadelphia, serving as a mayor of that city and later as comptroller of the U.S. Treasury. His father, John Barker, was influential in ...

The American painter Barnett Newman (1905-1970) was a central figure among color-field abstractionists between 1950 and 1970. Barnett Newman was born in New York City on Jan. 29, 1905. Between 1922 and 1926 he studied with Duncan Smith, Jo...

Jose Maria da Silva Paranhos, Barão do Rio Branco (1845-1912), was a Brazilian political leader whose success in defining Brazil's frontiers during the early years of the republic added extensive territory to the Brazilian patrimony...

Baron Georges Eugène Haussmann (1809-1891), as French prefect of the Seine, carried out under Napoleon III a huge urban renewal program for the city of Paris. During the administration of Baron Haussmann, 71 miles of new roads, 400 ...