To Kill a Mockingbird is a novel by Harper Lee(pictured) published in 1960 and considered a classic of modern American fiction. The novel is loosely based on the author's observations of her family and neighbors, as well as an event that occurred near her hometown in 1936, when she was 10 years old. The narrator's father, Atticus Finch, has served as a moral hero for many readers, and a model of integrity for lawyers. As a Southern Gothic novel and a bildungsroman, the primary themes of To Kill a Mockingbird involve racial injustice and the destruction of innocence, but scholars have also noted that Lee addresses the issues of class tensions, courage and compassion, and gender roles in the American Deep South. The book, which won a Pulitzer Prize, is widely taught in schools in English-speaking countries with lessons that emphasize tolerance and decry prejudice. Despite its themes, To Kill a Mockingbird has been the target of various campaigns to have it removed from public classrooms. (Full article...)
Hurricane Milton(pictured), one of the fastest-intensifying and most powerful Atlantic hurricanes on record, makes landfall in the U.S. state of Florida.
A gang attack on the Haitian town of Pont-Sondé leaves seventy people dead and fifty others injured.
Did you know...
Downtown Serekunda
... that because the capital of The Gambia is on a small island, its population has overflowed into Serekunda(pictured) in the nearby municipality of Kanifing?
... that Nancy S. Steinhardt completed her doctorate on medieval Chinese architecture before she was able to see any in person?
... that much of Archcliffe Fort was demolished in the 1920s to allow for expansion of a railway?
Silver certificates are a type of representative money issued between 1878 and 1964 in the United States as part of its circulation of paper currency. They were produced in response to silver agitation by citizens who were angered by the Coinage Act of 1873, which had effectively placed the United States on a gold standard. Since 1968 they have been redeemable only in Federal Reserve Notes and are thus obsolete, but they remain legal tender at their face value and hence are still an accepted form of currency. These are three banknotes from the 1934 series of silver certificates, designed by the Bureau of Engraving and Printing and comprising the denominations $1, $5 and $10. Each banknote bears a portrait of a different individual, identified above.