Portal:Biography

Topics: Culture; Geography; Health; History; Mathematics; Nature; People; Philosophy; Religion; Society; Technology

The Biography Portal

A biography is a detailed description or account of someone's life. More than a list of basic facts (education, work, relationships, and death), a biography also portrays a subject's experience of these events. Unlike a profile or curriculum vitae (résumé), a biography presents a subject's life story, highlighting various aspects of his or her life, including intimate details of experience, and may include an analysis of a subject's personality.

Biographical works are usually non-fiction, but fiction can also be used to portray a person's life. One in-depth form of biographical coverage is called legacy writing. Biographical works in diverse media—from literature to film—form the genre known as biography.

An authorized biography is written with the permission, cooperation, and, at times, participation of a subject or a subject's heirs.

An autobiography is about a life of a subject, written by that subject or sometimes with a collaborator.

More about biographies…

View new selections below (purge)

edit

Featured biography

Ahmose I (sometimes written Amosis I and meaning The Moon is Born) was a pharaoh of ancient Egypt and the founder of the Eighteenth dynasty. He was a member of the Theban royal house, the son of pharaoh Tao II Seqenenre and brother of the last pharaoh of the Seventeenth dynasty, King Kamose. Sometime during the reign of his father or grandfather, Thebes rebelled against the Hyksos, the rulers of Lower Egypt. When he was seven his father was killed, and when he was about ten his brother died of unknown causes, after reigning only three years. Ahmose I assumed the throne after the death of his brother, and upon coronation became known as Neb-Pehty-Re (The Lord of Strength is Re).

During his reign he completed the conquest and expulsion of the Hyksos from the delta region, restored Theban rule over the whole of Egypt and successfully reasserted Egyptian power in its formerly subject territories of Nubia and Canaan. He then reorganized the administration of the country, reopened quarries, mines and trade routes and began massive construction projects of a type that had not been undertaken since the time of the Middle Kingdom. This building program culminated in the construction of the last pyramid built by native Egyptian rulers. Ahmose's reign laid the foundations for the New Kingdom, under which Egyptian power reached its peak. His reign is usually dated to about 1550–1525 BC. (Read more...)

Archive – More "Featured biographies"...

edit

Selected portrait

Credit: Raden Saleh or Friedrich Carl Albert Schreuel (authorship disputed)

Raden Saleh Sjarif Boestaman (1807 or 1811 – April 23, 1880) is one of the best known painters from Indonesia and a pioneer of modern Indonesian art. He was considered to be the first modern artist from the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia), and his paintings corresponded with nineteenth-century romanticism, which was popular in Europe at the time.

More selected pictures...

Read more...

edit

Things you can do

Write an article
Expand an article about:

Improve an article by:

adding references

Review an article

John Gilchrist (linguist) •

Thomas Brattle •

Answer requests for comments
Assess an article

edit

On this day – April 10

Births

1778 - William Hazlitt, English writer (d. 1830)
1794 - Matthew Perry, American commodore (d. 1858)
1847 - Joseph Pulitzer, American journalist and publisher (d. 1911) (pictured)
1932 - Omar Sharif, Egyptian actor
1936 - John Madden, American football coach and broadcaster

Deaths

1882 - Dante Gabriel Rossetti, English poet and painter (b. 1828)
1919 - Emiliano Zapata, Mexican revolutionary (b. 1879)
1966 - Evelyn Waugh, English writer (b. 1903)

More of today's anniversaries...

edit

Did you know

... that Jean Thurel (pictured) was a soldier in the French Régiment de Touraine for more than 90 years?
... that military historian Lars Borgersrud's research includes taboo subjects like the fate of war children and Norwegian military officers with Nazi sympathies prior to and during World War II?
... that the farming of celery was first introduced to the United States by George Taylor in 1856?
... that Louisiana Sheriff Henderson Jordan sought to keep the death car of Bonnie and Clyde to compensate the officers who in 1934 risked their lives to capture the fugitives?
... that Thado Dhamma Yaza II, Viceroy of Prome in the 1500s, fought in nearly every military campaign of his brother King Bayinnaung, and helped to expand and defend the Toungoo Empire?
... that Donald S. Nesti clashed with the Tamburitzans as president of Duquesne University?
... that Geoffrey Prime worked for eleven years at GCHQ, and was only discovered to be a Soviet spy after his arrest in 1982 for the indecent assault of young girls?