Wikipedia:Main Page history/2024 February 3
From today's featured article
Brother Jonathan is an 1825 historical novel about the American Revolution. Author John Neal (pictured) was considered one of America's top novelists at the time. The story explores cross-cultural relationships and highlights cultural diversity within the Thirteen Colonies, stressing egalitarianism and challenging the conception of a unified American nation. The book's sexual themes were explicit for the period, addressing female sexual virtue and male guilt for sexual misdeeds. Scholars praised Brother Jonathan's extensive and early use of realism in depicting American culture and speech. It is Neal's longest work and possibly the longest single work of American fiction until well into the twentieth century. The editing process resulted in a number of inconsistencies in the plot. A financial failure, it received mixed but mostly warm reviews at the time. Readers of the twenty-first century are generally unaware of the book, and many scholars consider it too complex to be considered good. (Full article...)
Did you know ...
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- ... that Emais Roberts (pictured) administered the COVID-19 vaccination program in Palau and was one of the first to receive the vaccine in the country?
- ... that millions of people from Madagascar claim ancestral ties to ancient Jews, according to a centuries-old origin myth called the "Malagasy secret"?
- ... that Sunday lunch with Robert Alexander Neil was called "the best intellectual thing in Cambridge"?
- ... that the Apollo 14 Suprathermal Ion Detector Experiment is credited with the first direct observation of water on the Moon?
- ... that Minecraft YouTuber SkyDoesMinecraft, once the eleventh-most subscribed creator on the platform, attempted to sell their YouTube channel for nearly a million dollars?
- ... that Harley Poe's folk punk lyrics have been described as "some of the most deranged in the genre"?
- ... that the Nagagamisis Provincial Park has been enlarged four times and once reduced in size?
- ... that Kirk Raymond Jones became the first person to survive going over Niagara Falls without safety equipment, then died after going over it again in an inflatable ball?
In the news
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- Former prime minister of Pakistan Imran Khan (pictured) is sentenced to ten years in prison for leaking state secrets, and to fourteen years for corruption.
- Following damage to the helicopter's rotors, NASA ends the Ingenuity mission on Mars after seventy-two flights in almost three years.
- The Ram Mandir, a temple to Rama, is consecrated at a disputed site in Ayodhya, India.
- Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's lunar module SLIM lands on the Moon.
On this day
February 3: Feast day of Saint Laurence of Canterbury (Western Christianity); Four Chaplains' Day in the United States (1943)
- 1813 – Argentine War of Independence: José de San Martín and the Mounted Grenadiers Regiment defeated Spanish royalist forces in the Battle of San Lorenzo.
- 1930 – The Communist Party of Indochina, the Communist Party of Annam and the Communist League of Indochina merged to form the Communist Party of Vietnam.
- 1941 – Second World War: Free French and British forces (aircraft pictured) began the Battle of Keren to capture the strategic town of Keren in Italian East Africa.
- 1953 – Hundreds of native creoles known as Forros were massacred on São Tomé Island by the colonial administration and Portuguese landowners.
- 2023 – A freight train derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, releasing hazardous materials into the surrounding area.
- Coloman, King of Hungary (d. 1116)
- Abu Bakar of Johor (b. 1833)
- Simone Weil (b. 1909)
- Kanna Hashimoto (b. 1999)
Today's featured picture
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The brown-headed cowbird (Molothrus ater) is a small cowbird in the icterid family, Icteridae, native to temperate and subtropical North America. It is distinguished from other icterids by its finch-like head and beak and its smaller size. The adult male is iridescent black in color with a brown head, while the adult female is slightly smaller and is dull grey with a pale throat and very fine streaking on the underparts. The brown-headed cowbird is an obligate brood parasite, laying its eggs in the nests of other small perching birds and relying on those birds to raise its young. Its eggs have been documented in the nests of at least 220 host species, including hummingbirds and raptors. This female brown-headed cowbird was photographed in Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge in New York City. Photograph credit: Rhododendrites
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