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From today's featured article

Obverse

The Old Spanish Trail half dollar is a commemorative coin struck by the United States Bureau of the Mint in 1935. It was designed by L. W. Hoffecker, a coin dealer who had been the moving force behind the effort for a Gadsden Purchase half dollar, vetoed by President Herbert Hoover in 1930, and he sought another commemorative coin that he could control if authorizing legislation was passed. He chose the travels of Spanish officer Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca in the early 16th century. Though Hoffecker's hometown of El Paso, Texas, is featured on the coin, Cabeza de Vaca came nowhere near its site. Hoffecker purchased the coins from the Mint at face value and sold them to collectors, ostensibly on behalf of the local museum, but in fact for his personal profit, something he later denied before Congress. His design for the coin, featuring the head of a cow (the English meaning of cabeza de vaca), has brought mixed reviews from numismatic commentators. (Full article...)

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In the news

Mars Oxygen ISRU Experiment

KRI Nanggala, an Indonesian Navy submarine, is found sunk in the Bali Sea with 53 people on board presumed dead.
The Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment (engineering model pictured) on the Perseverance rover produces oxygen from carbon dioxide in the Martian atmosphere.
In the United States, former police officer Derek Chauvin is found guilty of the murder of George Floyd.
President of Chad Idriss Déby is killed during a rebel offensive.
Miguel Díaz-Canel is selected as First Secretary of the Communist Party of Cuba, succeeding Raúl Castro.

On this day

April 24: Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day (1915)

The original Library of Congress building, Washington, D.C.

1800 – The Library of Congress (building pictured), the de facto national library of the United States, was established as part of an act of Congress providing for the transfer of the nation's capital from Philadelphia to Washington, D.C.
1866 – German composer Max Bruch conducted the premiere of his first violin concerto, which later became his most famous work.
1915 – The Armenian Genocide in the Ottoman Empire began with the arrest and deportation of hundreds of prominent Armenians in Constantinople.
2011 – Secret documents relating to detainees at the United States' Guantanamo Bay detention camp were released on WikiLeaks and several independent news organizations.

Benjamin Lee Whorf (b. 1897)
Bridget Riley (b. 1931)
Kumar Dharmasena (b. 1971)

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Today's featured picture

The Tomb of Nebamun is the burial place of a middle-ranking official from the Eighteenth Dynasty of Egypt who lived around 1350 BCE and worked at the vast temple complex near Thebes. The richly decorated tomb was discovered in 1820 by a young Greek, Giovanni d'Athanasi, an agent for the English Egyptologist Henry Salt. Portions of the plaster frescoes were hacked off the walls and sold to the British Museum the following year. This polychrome fragment depicts date palms, sycamore trees, and a pool teeming with life. D'Athanasi died in poverty without revealing the precise location of the tomb.

Painting credit: unknown; photographed by Yann Forget

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