Year 1868 (MDCCCLXVIII) was a leap year starting on Wednesday (link will display the full calendar) of the Gregorian Calendar and a leap year starting on Monday of the 12-day slower Julian calendar.
Bartolomé Mitre Martínez (June 26, 1821 – January 19, 1906) was an Argentine statesman, military figure, and author. He was the President of Argentina from 1862 to 1868.
Mitre was born in Buenos Aires to a Greek Argentine family originally named Mitropoulos.
As a liberal, he was an opponent of Juan Manuel de Rosas, and he was forced into exile. He worked as a soldier and journalist in Uruguay as a supporter of General Fructuoso Rivera, who named Mitre Lieutenant Coronel of the Uruguayan Army in 1846. Mitre later lived in Bolivia, Peru, and Chile, and in the latter country, he collaborated with legal scholar and fellow Argentine exile Juan Bautista Alberdi in the latter's periodical, El Comercio of Valparaíso.
Mitre returned to Argentina after the defeat of Rosas. at the 1852 Battle of Caseros. He was a leader of the revolt of Buenos Aires against Justo José de Urquiza's federal system, and was appointed to important posts in the provincial government after Buenos Aires seceded from the Confederation.
Edvard Hagerup Grieg /ˈɛdʋɑɖ ˈhɑːgəɾʉːp gɾiːg/ (15 June 1843 – 4 September 1907) was a Norwegian composer and pianist. He is best known for his Piano Concerto in A minor, for his incidental music to Henrik Ibsen's play Peer Gynt (which includes Morning Mood and In the Hall of the Mountain King), and for his collection of piano miniatures Lyric Pieces.
Edvard Hagerup Grieg was born in Bergen, Norway on 15 June 1843. His parents were Alexander Grieg (1806–1875), a merchant and vice consul in Bergen, and Gesine Judithe Hagerup (1814–1875), a music teacher and daughter of Edvard Hagerup. The family name, originally spelled Greig, has Scottish origins. After the Battle of Culloden in 1746, Grieg's great-grandfather traveled widely, settling in Norway about 1770, and establishing business interests in Bergen.
Edvard Grieg was raised in a musical area. His mother was his first piano teacher and taught him to play at the age of 6. Grieg studied in several schools,[clarification needed] including Tank's School. He often brought in samples of his music to class.[citation needed]
Alice Sara Ott (born 1988) is a German-Japanese classical pianist.
Ott was born in Munich, Germany, in 1988; her Japanese mother had studied piano in Tokyo, and her father was a German civil engineer. At the age of three, after being taken to a concert, she decided she wanted to become a pianist; as she says, she realised that "music was the language that goes much beyond any words" and that she wanted to communicate and express herself through music. She started piano lessons when she was four, and reached the final stage of the youth competition in Munich at the age of five, playing to a full house in the Hercules Hall.
From the age of twelve, she studied at the Salzburg Mozarteum with Karl-Heinz Kämmerling while continuing her school education in Munich. Ott has won awards at a number of piano competitions, including first prize at the 2004 Pianello Val Tidone Competition. She has made recordings of Franz Liszt's Transcendental Etudes and Frédéric Chopin's waltzes for Deutsche Grammophon, and is currently performing concert tours in Europe, Japan, and the United States.
Nicholas II (Russian: Николай II, Николай Александрович Романов, tr. Nikolay II, Nikolay Alexandrovich Romanov [nʲɪkɐˈlaj ftɐˈroj, nʲɪkɐˈlaj əlʲɪkˈsandrəvʲɪtɕ rɐˈmanəf]) (18 May [O.S. 6 May] 1868 – 17 July 1918) was the last Emperor of Russia, Grand Duke of Finland, and titular King of Poland. His official short title was Nicholas II, Emperor and Autocrat of All the Russias and he is known as Saint Nicholas the Passion-Bearer by the Russian Orthodox Church. He has often been referred to as Saint Nicholas the Martyr.
Nicholas II ruled from 1894 until his abdication on 15 March 1917. His reign saw Imperial Russia go from being one of the foremost great powers of the world to economic and military collapse. Critics nicknamed him Bloody Nicholas because of the Khodynka Tragedy, Bloody Sunday, the anti-Semitic pogroms, his execution of political opponents, and his pursuit of military campaigns on a hitherto unprecedented scale.
Under his rule, Russia was defeated in the Russo-Japanese War, including the almost total annihilation of the Russian fleet at the Battle of Tsushima. As head of state, he approved the Russian mobilization of August 1914, which marked the beginning of Russia's involvement in World War I, a war in which 3.3 million Russians were killed. The Imperial Army's big losses and the monarchy's incompetent handling with the war, along with other policies directed by Nicholas during his reign, are often cited as the leading causes of the fall of the Romanov dynasty.