James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851) was an American romance writer. He largely focused on the untamed frontiers of colonial America, emphasizing Native American history. Some of his most famous works include The Deerslayer and The Last of the Mohicans, among other stories in his Leatherstocking Tales.

Above all, he was quite the stud.

Arthur Rimbaud (20 October 1854- 10 November 1891)was a poet in 19th century France. He wrote some great poetry and everybody loved him and his best friend and sometimes lover, Paul Verlaine, loved him so much that he shot Arthur in the ass because he got jealous. He was described by Victor Hugo as “the infant Shakespeare” He decided to retire at the age of 22 and moved to Africa where he started an empire of dealing with ivory. he died at the age of 37. How can you not love such an interesting person?

See this man and his magnificent turban? This is Giovanni Batista Belzoni! He was a six-foot-seven strongman with a travelling circus until he ended up in Egypt to show off his engineering skills to the Khedive of Egypt and Sudan. Yep, he wasn’t just muscles. He’d worked out a hydrolics system that would raise the waters of a little river known as THE NILE! The job didn’t pan out ,but did that bum out the Great Belzoni and his chameleon-collecting, cross-dressing wife, Sarah? No it did not! Instead they set off down the nile, fell in love with Egypt and became archeologists.

Have you ever seen the statue of Ramses II in the British Museum? You know how it got there. Let me give you a hint. 130 men, a pully and log system and all of engineering skills that sit under that fancy headwear. He also had to fight off some gun-toting frenchmen who also wanted the giant statute! There is a reason “The Young Memnon” isn’t in a French Museum. In fact a fair slab of the stuff found in the British museum is all there thanks to him.

You know the Pyramid of Khafre? Guess who was the first European inside that baby in thousands of years? Was it the french who wanted to blow the entrance open with dynomite? Was it the English who kept taking credit for Belzoni’s awesome discoveries? Or was it a giant bearded Italian strongman who used nothing but his enginuity (and a battering ram). And he made sure Henry Salt couldn’t take all the credit like he did for some of Belzoni’s other finds, the Italian wrote BELZONI WAS HERE in giant undesputible letters on the wall. Most historians frown on him for this, but then again most historians weren’t the first inside a freakin’ pyramid.

He was also the first inside the Tomb of Seti I, also known as KV17. Go look it up. We’ll wait. Yep. See that Egyptian splendor. All found by Belzoni.

To sum up. Imagine Indianna Jones as an Goliathian Italian Strongman who blew his way into tombs with battering rams and had brawls with other archeologists who tried to touch his stuff. That’s Belzoni.

Malcolm X. Do I even need to elaborate further? 

My history crush is Charles Ridgely, a dapper Southern gentleman and descendant from a long line of Charles Ridgelys.   He was master of the Hampton House in Maryland during the civil war.  Although he was aligned with the Confederates, he ducked out of the war early because he got into trouble with Union soldiers and wanted to escape arrest.  In his will, he left the Hampton House to his wife, who managed the estate and raised their seven kids on her own.

Young Oak Kim: soldier, store owner, badass. He was the only Korean-American serving in the 442nd, a segregated Japanese-American regiment serving in World War II. When superiors offered to transfer him he said, “There is no Japanese nor Korean here. We’re all Americans and we’re fighting for the same cause.”

He taught his platoon aggressive small unit tactics and was called Samurai Kim. He took another guy with him and they crawled all night into enemy territory to capture German soldiers and gain intel. When his group got captured, he said “YOLO” and escaped with a medic. He reenlisted after WWII and was the first Asian American ever to command a regular combat battalion in war. He has a school named after him.
 He has like, a billion medals.

BOSS.

We all know we love men in fitting suits and pants, but once upon a time, it was more fashionable for men to wear shocking colors and have tons of decorations on their clothes than something that fit halfway decently.

Then, there was this man—Beau Brummell. Born in 1778, he decided that wearing a pink jacket with white lace and white silk breeches and more embroidery was lame (this was actually once worn by the Prince Regent, aka the figure King George IV) and that simpler clothing was a lot better, and flashy colors were better for actors in costume. Boots didn’t have tassels, cravats were starched and stiff, and England became famous for its tailors.

So when you imagine Mr. Darcy wearing a nice dark jacket or someone from a romance novel dressed in all those fine breeches, thank this wonderful man who took the courts of the Regency Period by storm and forever changed the fashion industry, effects that last to this day, not that there weren’t some imperfections to his style—his clothes were so well tailored that it’s said it took him hours to dress because the clothes were so tight.

Don’t imagine how hard it was for men to sit down then; by the time the Victorian age came around, clothes had certainly loosened up.

absentmindedfools:

We all know that Rasputin was one handsome devil. Don’t kid yourself. 

“There’s no disputin, I just love Rasputin. When our teacher told us to turn our books to his chapter, and a big picture of him popper up, I just couldn’t concentrate on the rest of the lesson. I couldn’t take my eyes off his beautiful bearded face. When I heard that he solicited sexual favors from women, I felt an extreme uncontrollable jealousy. That night I went to bed with my history book and read the chapter on Rasputin, curtains drawn, candles lit and a Barry White record playing” 

Yahoo Answers “I feel a strange sexual attraction to Rasputin of Russia?” 

This hunk, Gavrilo Princip, is known as the man who assassinated Franz Ferdinand, becoming the trigger that pulled the already-loaded gun of WWI.

Terrible, right? Depends on who you ask. Though Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie had not personally wronged Princip, they were the heirs of Franz Joseph, the Austro-Hungarian monarch who had rulled for decades with an iron fist, and did not allow the Slavic majority in the balkin peninsula many rights or any say in how they were to be governed.

A Yugoslav nationalist movement had been stirring. Young Bosnia, of which Gavrilo Princip was an involved member, was a group of radical youth who wished to unite all Yugoslavs, forming a nation independent of Austria-Hungary and free from the tyrant hand of Franz Joseph.

When Franz Ferdinand made it clear that he intended to rule the Serbs more liberally, Princip and Young Bosnia feared that their movement would lose momentum. Something had to be done. The Black Hand was formed; a no-nonsense group who’s emblem consisted of a vial of poison, a daggar, a bomb, and flag featuring the skull & crossbones.

Gavrilo Princip, a tragically passionate nationalist, shot & killed Franz Ferdinand and his newlywed wife Sophie in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914.

Here he is on trial, seated in the middle of the front row.

He died in prison on April 28, 1918.

This is John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) who was noted for his (excellent) portraits of people like Theodore Roosevelt and one of his most famous (and scandalous) of ‘Madame X’. This painting is his self-portrait.