Wikipedia:Main Page history/2021 June 13

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From today's featured article

Early 20th-century map of Barren Island

Barren Island is a former island on the southeast shore of Brooklyn in New York City. Located on Jamaica Bay, it was occupied by the Lenape Native Americans prior to the arrival of Dutch settlers in the 17th century. Its name is a corruption of Beeren Eylandt, the Dutch-language term for "Bears' Island". From the 1850s to the mid-1930s, the island was an industrial complex with plants for rendering fish and processing the carcasses of the city's dead horses, converting them into industrial products. Because of this, the body of water on the island's western shore was nicknamed "Dead Horse Bay". By the 1920s, most of the industrial activity had tapered off, and most residents were evicted in the late 1920s for the construction of an airport called Floyd Bennett Field. Since 1972, the former island's site has been part of the Gateway National Recreation Area, managed by the National Park Service. (Full article...)

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Mary Custis Lee

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In the news

Ganymede

The spacecraft Juno performs a flyby of Jupiter's moon Ganymede (pictured).
Using a compromised encrypted device network, a multinational sting operation results in hundreds of arrests and the seizure of several tons of illegal drugs.
Two trains collide in Sindh, Pakistan, killing at least 63 people.
At the British Academy Television Awards, Save Me Too wins Best Drama and Inside No. 9 wins Best Scripted Comedy.

On this day

June 13

Henry Grace à Dieu as depicted in the Anthony Roll

313 – The Edict of Milan, an agreement between Constantine the Great and Licinius to treat Christians benevolently within the Roman Empire, was posted in Nicomedia.
1514 – Henry Grace à Dieu (depicted), the largest warship in the world at the time, was launched from Woolwich Dockyard, England.
1971 – The New York Times published the first excerpts from the Pentagon Papers, a 7,000-page classified Department of Defense history of the United States' political and military involvement in the Vietnam War.
1981 – English teenager Marcus Sarjeant fired six blanks at Queen Elizabeth II as she rode down The Mall to the Trooping the Colour ceremony.

Jean-Baptiste Benoît Eyriès (d. 1846)
Augusto Roa Bastos (b. 1917)
Malik Meraj Khalid (d. 2003)

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Today's featured picture

Lichfield Cathedral is an Anglican cathedral in Lichfield, Staffordshire. A church was first built on the site in 700 by Bishop Headda to house the bones of Saint Chad of Mercia. The original wooden building was replaced by a Norman cathedral made from stone, which in turn was replaced by the present Gothic structure, begun in 1195. The cathedral suffered extensive damage during the English Civil War: the central spire was demolished, the roofs ruined and the stained-glass windows smashed. Bishop John Hacket began the restoration in the 1660s, but the damage was not fully repaired until the 19th century. This photograph shows the exterior of the cathedral as seen from the northeast.

Photograph credit: David Iliff

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