Wikipedia:Main Page history/2014 April 26

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From today's featured article

Original Stories from Real Life is the only complete work of children's literature by the 18th-century British feminist Mary Wollstonecraft. It begins with a frame story that sketches out the education of two young girls by their maternal teacher Mrs. Mason, followed by a series of didactic tales. The book was first published by Joseph Johnson in 1788; a second, illustrated edition, with engravings (pictured) by William Blake, was released in 1791 and remained in print for around a quarter of a century. Wollstonecraft employed the then burgeoning genre of children's literature to promote the education of women and an emerging middle-class ideology. She argued that women would be able to become rational adults if they were educated properly as children, which was not a widely held belief in the 18th century, and contended that the nascent middle-class ethos was superior to the court culture represented by fairy tales and to the values of chance and luck found in chapbook stories for the poor. Wollstonecraft, in developing her own pedagogy, also responded to the works of the two most important educational theorists of the 18th century: John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. (Full article...)

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Did you know...

From Wikipedia's new and recently improved content:

... that Priddy Nine Barrows and Ashen Hill Barrow Cemeteries (shown in the video) include 17 round barrows but may have had 20 in the Bronze Age?
... that Ernest Psichari, grandson of liberal philosopher Ernest Renan, became an idol of right-wing French nationalism?
... that according to a national report, the conviction rate of rape in Germany has declined, from 20% in the 1980s to 13% by 2000?
... that Malcolm took the throne from Macbeth after the latter killed Malcolm's father, King Duncan, in William Shakespeare's Macbeth?
... that the Praja Socialist Party, the Ambedkarite Harijan Mandal and the Akali Dal formed an alliance ahead of the 1962 Jammu and Kashmir Legislative Assembly election?
... that the "world's luckiest man" survived seven brushes with death, then won the lottery?

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In the news

A train derails in Katanga, Democratic Republic of the Congo, killing at least 48 people.
More than 230 female students are declared missing after a mass kidnapping in Borno State, Nigeria.
At the Boston Marathon, American Meb Keflezighi wins the men's race and Kenyan Rita Jeptoo (pictured) wins the women's race.
An avalanche on Mount Everest kills sixteen Nepalese guides.
NASA ends the LADEE mission by intentionally crashing the spacecraft into the Moon.

Recent deaths: Rubin "Hurricane" Carter
Ongoing: Ukrainian unrest – MV Sewol

On this day...

April 26: World Intellectual Property Day; Feast day of Our Lady of Good Counsel (Roman Catholic Church); Easter Saturday (Christianity, 2014)

1865 – U.S. Army soldiers cornered and fatally shot John Wilkes Booth, the assassin of U.S. President Abraham Lincoln, in rural northern Virginia, ending a twelve-day manhunt.
1937 – Spanish Civil War: The Bombing of Guernica by the Condor Legion of the German Luftwaffe resulted in a devastating firestorm that caused widespread destruction and civilian deaths and inspired one of Pablo Picasso's most famous paintings.
1964 – Tanganyika and Zanzibar merged to form Tanzania (flag pictured) with Julius Nyerere as its first president.
1989 – A tornado struck the Manikganj District of Bangladesh, killing an estimated 1,300 people, the deadliest tornado in history.
1994 – Just prior to landing at Nagoya International Airport, the co-pilot of China Airlines Flight 140 inadvertently pushed the wrong button, causing the plane to crash and killing 264 of the 271 people on board.

More anniversaries: April 25 – April 26 – April 27

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It is now April 26, 2014 (UTC) – Reload this page

Today's featured picture

The Shakespeare Memorial Theatre (pictured here in a late 19th-century photochrom) was a theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon, beside the River Avon, constructed in 1879 to commemorate the English playwright and poet William Shakespeare. This theatre burned down in 1926, and was replaced by the Elisabeth Scott-designed Royal Shakespeare Theatre, which still stands.

Photochrom: Detroit Publishing Company; restoration: Adam Cuerden

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