Wikipedia:Main Page history/2019 October 7

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From today's featured article

The Poitevin is a French breed of draft horse. Named for the former province of Poitou in west-central France, now a part of Nouvelle-Aquitaine, it originated in the seventeenth century when horses of Flemish or Dutch origin, brought to the area by engineers working to drain the Poitevin Marsh, interbred with local horses. It may be of any solid coat color, and is sometimes striped dun, a color not seen in other French draft horses. Although it has the size and conformation of a draft horse, the Poitevin has not generally performed draft work. Its principal traditional use was the production of Poitevin mules, by breeding with large Baudet du Poitou donkeys; the mules were once in worldwide demand for agricultural and other work. In the early twentieth century there were some 50,000 brood mares, producing between 18,000 and 20,000 mules per year, but the Poitevin is today an endangered breed. (Full article...)

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Did you know...

Jim Furyk

... that after 1.5 million rounds played over the history of the PGA Tour, Jim Furyk (pictured) shot the first 58?
... that director Avi Belkin said the title of his 2019 documentary Mike Wallace Is Here once constituted "the four most-dreaded words in the English language"?
... that after leading a failed rebellion in his native Morocco, Uthman ibn Abi al-Ula led the Volunteers of the Faith in Granada, where he became a major political figure?
... that Scottish poet Sorley MacLean once called upon the Red Army to invade his homeland?
... that the sexual characteristics of the Hollow Dogū, a National Treasure of Japan, are so mixed that the Jōmon figurine has been said to "transcend gender"?
... that in 1945, London medical student John Hancock's studies were interrupted when he contracted typhus in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp?
... that electric moped sharing company Revel deposited 1,000 new mopeds on New York City streets in the space of a week?
... that Erland Erlandson became the first known European to cross the Labrador Peninsula from the Hudson Strait to the Atlantic coast when his guides misled him?

In the news

B-17 Flying Fortress

At least ninety people are killed in protests over poor living conditions and state corruption in Iraq.
A privately owned Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress (pictured) crashes in Connecticut, United States, killing seven people and injuring seven others.
Peruvian president Martín Vizcarra dissolves Congress, resulting in a constitutional crisis.

On this day

October 7

Model T production at the Highland Park Ford Plant

1542 – Spanish explorer Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo became the first European to set foot on Santa Catalina Island, off the coast of California.
1763 – King George III of the United Kingdom issued a royal proclamation closing most of New France to the residents of the Thirteen Colonies and reserving it for indigenous peoples.
1913 – The Highland Park Ford Plant in the Detroit area of Michigan became the world's first car factory to implement a moving assembly line (pictured), eventually reducing Ford Model T production time from 12 hours to 93 minutes.
1944 – The Holocaust: When Sonderkommando (work unit) members in Auschwitz learned that they were due to be killed, they staged a revolt and although a few managed to escape, most were massacred on the same day.
2006 – Anna Politkovskaya, a Russian journalist and human rights activist, was assassinated in the elevator of her apartment block in central Moscow.

Stanisław Żółkiewski (d. 1620) · Harold Geiger (b. 1884) · Charlotte Perrelli (b. 1974)

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From today's featured list

Black flying fox

Fruit bats, also known as megabats, are the 197 species of bats that make up the suborder Megachiroptera, found throughout the tropics of Africa, Asia, and Oceania, of which 186 are extant. The suborder is part of the order Chiroptera (bats), and contains a single family, Pteropodidae. The family is divided into between two to six subfamilies, with recent phylogenetic analysis suggesting a different classification structure of the known species than before. Bats have been traditionally thought to be a monophyletic group; according to this model, all living fruit bats and microbats (Microchiroptera) are descendants of a common ancestor species that was already capable of flight. However, there are alternate hypotheses which conclude that bats are paraphyletic. The flying primate hypothesis was created in the 1980s, stating that, based on morphological evidence, the Megachiroptera evolved flight separately from the Microchiroptera, although genetic evidence supports the monophyly of bats. (Full list...)

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Today's featured picture

Edgar Allan Poe (January 19, 1809 – October 7, 1849) was an American writer, editor, and literary critic. Poe is best known for his poetry and short stories, particularly his tales of mystery and the macabre. He is widely regarded as a central figure of Romanticism in the United States and of American literature as a whole, and he was one of the country's earliest practitioners of the short story. He is generally considered the inventor of the detective fiction genre and is further credited with contributing to the emerging genre of science fiction. He was the first well-known American writer to earn a living through writing alone, resulting in a financially difficult life and career.

This picture is the "Annie" daguerreotype of Poe, probably taken in 1849, a few months before his death, and given to his friend Annie L. Richmond. The daguerreotype, which is one of a very few known photographs of Poe, is now in the J. Paul Getty Museum.

Photograph credit: unknown; restored by Yann Forget and Adam Cuerden

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