Wikipedia:Main Page history/2019 May 15

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From today's featured article

Tropical Depression Nineteen-E was a weak tropical cyclone that caused flooding in northwestern Mexico and the United States during the 2018 Pacific hurricane season. By September 7, 2018, the storm had entered the northeastern Pacific Ocean, after crossing Central America. Despite disorganization and its close proximity to land, the meandering disturbance developed into a tropical depression in the Gulf of California on September 19, with peak maximum sustained winds reported as 35 mph (55 km/h). Although the storm quickly deteriorated after landfall, thirteen people were killed in Chihuahua, Sinaloa, and Sonora, and recorded agricultural losses exceeded US$40 million. Overall, the storm affected eleven Mexican states, with torrential rainfall and flooding in Baja California Sur, Sinaloa, and Sonora. Remnant moisture from Nineteen-E led to severe flooding in the U.S. states of Arizona, Texas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas, with damage estimates totalling about $250 million. (Full article...)

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Did you know...

Stage of the
Schlosstheater Schwetzingen

... that Giselher Klebe's opera Das Märchen von der schönen Lilie, on a libretto by his wife based on Goethe's fairy tale, was premiered at the Schlosstheater Schwetzingen (pictured) 50 years ago today?
... that in 1987, Royal Society of Canada fellow Kathryn Brush was one of the first women to be hired for a full-time position in art history at the University of Western Ontario?
... that El Drago Milenario, located in Parque del Drago, Tenerife, is the largest and oldest known specimen of Dracaena draco?
... that the remains of missing Israeli soldier Zechariah Baumel were discovered in a cemetery in the Yarmouk refugee camp near Damascus, Syria, nearly 37 years after he disappeared in the 1982 Lebanon War?
... that Red Square is now Alexander Nevsky Square?
... that the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius co-ruled with his adoptive brother Lucius Verus in the first joint rule between Roman emperors, and later co-ruled with his own son Commodus?
... that the Georgetown Neighborhood Library houses the collection of its predecessor library established by George Peabody in 1872?
... that a nine-day-old citizen of the United States, Archie Mountbatten-Windsor, is seventh in the line of succession to the British throne?

In the news

Doris Day in 1957

American actress and singer Doris Day (pictured) dies at the age of 97.
In association football, the English Premier League concludes with Manchester City winning the title.
The United Nations reports that, due to human activity, the Earth's biodiversity has suffered a catastrophic decline unprecedented in human history.
At least 29 people are killed in clashes at the Gaza–Israel border.

On this day

May 15: Feast day of Saint Mo Chutu (Irish Catholicism); Nakba Day in Palestinian communities

Elizabeth Cady Stanton
and Susan B. Anthony

1836 – English astronomer Francis Baily first observed "Baily's beads", a phenomenon during a solar eclipse in which the rugged lunar limb topography allows beads of sunlight to shine through.
1869 – Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton (both pictured) founded the National Woman Suffrage Association, breaking away from the American Equal Rights Association which they had also previously founded.
1904 – Russo-Japanese War: After striking several mines off Port Arthur, the Japanese battleships Hatsuse and Yashima sank.
1948 – One day after the Israeli Declaration of Independence, Egypt, Transjordan, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Saudi Arabia invaded Israel to begin the 1948 Arab–Israeli War.
2004 – Arsenal became the first football team in England's top flight to finish a season undefeated since Preston North End did so in 1888–1889.

Élie Metchnikoff (b. 1845) · Jakucho Setouchi (b. 1922) · Elisabeth Bing (d. 2015)

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Today's featured picture

The King of Brobdingnag and Gulliver is a satirical print produced in 1803 by British caricaturist and printmaker James Gillray, executed in etching and aquatint. It is based on the fictional land of Brobdingnag from Jonathan Swift's 1726 novel Gulliver's Travels, which is inhabited by giants. The print shows a profile of George III of the United Kingdom, representing the Brobdingnagian king, holding a miniature Napoleon, representing Gulliver, while observing him through a spyglass. It was published on 26 June, five weeks after the breakdown of the Treaty of Amiens, which precipitated the Napoleonic Wars. The king's speech balloon in the top half of the print reads "My little friend Grildrig, you have made a most admirable panegyric upon Yourself and Country, but from what I can gather from your own relation & the answers I have with much pains wringed & extorted from you, I cannot but conclude you to be one of the most pernicious, little-odious-reptiles, that nature ever suffer'd to crawl upon the surface of the Earth". This copy of the print is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Print credit: James Gillray; restored by Chris Woodrich

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