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Edgar Allan Poe was an American author, poet, editor, and literary critic, considered part of the American Romantic Movement. Best known for his tales of mystery and the macabre, Poe was one of the earliest American practitioners of the short story and is generally considered the inventor of the detective fiction genre. He is further credited with contributing to the emerging genre of science fiction. He was the first well-known American writer to try to earn a living through writing alone, resulting in a financially difficult life and career.<br/><br/> By 1832, Edgar began to write fiction with the idea of entering story contests. He also discovered opium. A commonly used medicine at the time, it was a stimulant that masked hunger and cold and extended sense of time.<br/><br/> In September 1849, Poe left Boston to visit friends and relatives and to look after some business, travelling toward New York City via Baltimore and Philadelphia. He never made it past Baltimore. He arrived there drunk and disappeared for a mysterious five days. He was eventually found in a delirium and taken to the hospital where he clung to life for a few more days. Edgar Allan Poe died on Sunday October 7, 1849.
James Buchanan, Jr. (April 23, 1791 – June 1, 1868) was the 15th President of the United States (1857–61), serving immediately prior to the American Civil War. He represented Pennsylvania in the United States House of Representatives and later the Senate, then served as Minister to Russia under President Andrew Jackson.<br/><br/> He was named Secretary of State under President James K. Polk, and as of 2016 is the last former Secretary of State to serve as President of the United States. After Buchanan turned down an offer to sit on the Supreme Court, President Franklin Pierce appointed him Ambassador to the United Kingdom, in which capacity he helped draft the Ostend Manifesto.
John Quincy Adams July 11, 1767 – February 23, 1848) was an American statesman who served as the sixth President of the United States from 1825 to 1829. He also served as a diplomat, a Senator and member of the House of Representatives.<br/><br/> He was a member of the Federalist, Democratic-Republican, National Republican, and later Anti-Masonic and Whig parties.
Franklin Pierce (November 23, 1804 – October 8, 1869) was the 14th President of the United States (1853–57). Pierce was a northern Democrat who saw the abolitionist movement as a fundamental threat to the unity of the nation.<br/><br/> His polarizing actions in championing and signing the Kansas–Nebraska Act and enforcing the Fugitive Slave Act failed to stem intersectional conflict, setting the stage for Southern secession.
Friedrich Wilhelm Heinrich Alexander von Humboldt was a Prussian geographer, naturalist, and explorer, and the younger brother of the Prussian minister, philosopher and linguist Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835). Humboldt's quantitative work on botanical geography laid the foundation for the field of biogeography.<br/><br/> Between 1799 and 1804, Humboldt travelled extensively in Latin America, exploring and describing it for the first time from a modern scientific point of view. His description of the journey was written up and published in an enormous set of volumes over 21 years. He was one of the first to propose that the lands bordering the Atlantic Ocean were once joined (South America and Africa in particular).<br/><br/> Later, his five-volume work, Kosmos (1845), attempted to unify the various branches of scientific knowledge. Humboldt supported and worked with other scientists, including Joseph-Louis Gay-Lussac, Justus von Liebig, Louis Agassiz, Matthew Fontaine Maury, Georg von Neumayer, and most notably, Aimé Bonpland, with whom he conducted much of his scientific exploration.
Andrew Jackson (March 15, 1767 – June 8, 1845) was an American statesman who served as the seventh President of the United States from 1829 to 1837.
The Ryukyu Kingdom (historical English name: Lewchew, Luchu, or Loochoo) was an independent kingdom that ruled most of the Ryukyu Islands from the 15th to the 19th century. The kings of Ryukyu unified Okinawa Island and extended the kingdom to the Amami Islands in modern-day Kagoshima Prefecture, and the Sakishima Islands near Taiwan.<br/><br/> Despite its small size, the kingdom played a central role in the maritime trade networks of medieval East and Southeast Asia.
William Henry Harrison (February 9, 1773 – April 4, 1841) was the ninth President of the United States (1841), an American military officer and politician, and the last president born as a British subject. He was also the first president to die in office.<br/><br/> He was 68 years, 23 days old when inaugurated, the oldest president to take office until Ronald Reagan in 1981. Harrison died on his 32nd day in office of complications from pneumonia, serving the shortest tenure in United States presidential history.
Frederic Francois Chopin (22 February or 1 March 1810 – 17 October 1849), born Fryderyk Franciszek Chopin, was a Polish composer and virtuoso pianist of the Romantic era, who wrote primarily for the solo piano.<br/><br/> He gained and has maintained renown worldwide as one of the leading musicians of his era.
John Tyler (March 29, 1790 – January 18, 1862) was the tenth President of the United States (1841–45). He was also, briefly, the tenth vice president (1841), elected to that office on the 1840 Whig ticket with William Henry Harrison.<br/><br/> Tyler became president after Harrison's death in April 1841, only a month after the start of the new administration. Known to that point as a supporter of states' rights, which endeared him to his fellow Virginians, his actions as president showed that he was willing to back nationalist policies as long as they did not infringe on the powers of the states. A firm believer in manifest destiny, President Tyler sought to strengthen and preserve the Union through territorial expansion, most notably the annexation of the independent Republic of Texas in his last days in office.
Frederic Francois Chopin (22 February or 1 March 1810 – 17 October 1849), born Fryderyk Franciszek Chopin, was a Polish composer and virtuoso pianist of the Romantic era, who wrote primarily for the solo piano.<br/><br/> He gained and has maintained renown worldwide as one of the leading musicians of his era.
Zachary Taylor (November 24, 1784 – July 9, 1850) was the 12th President of the United States, serving from March 1849 until his death in July 1850. Before his presidency, Taylor was a career officer in the United States Army, rising to the rank of major general.<br/><br/> Taylor's status as a national hero as a result of his victories in the Mexican-American War won him election to the White House. His top priority as president was preserving the Union, but he died seventeen months into his term, before making any progress on the status of slavery, which had been inflaming tensions in Congress.