Wikipedia:Main Page history/2018 April 10

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From today's featured article

Original charter

Æthelstan A is the name given by historians to an unknown scribe who drafted charters (example pictured) for land grants made by King Æthelstan of England between 928 and 935. Providing far more information than other charters of the period, they contain the date and place of the grants and an unusually long list of witnesses, including kings of Wales and occasionally Scotland and Strathclyde. The charters commence shortly after Æthelstan conquered Northumbria in 927, making him the first king to rule the whole of England. They give him titles such as "King of the English" and "King of the Whole of Britain", reflecting his claim to a higher status than previous West Saxon kings. The charters are written in the elaborate hermeneutic style of Latin, a hallmark of the English Benedictine Reform; the style became dominant in Anglo-Latin literature in the mid-tenth century. The scribe stopped drafting charters after 935, and his successors returned to a simpler style, suggesting that he was working on his own rather than as a member of a royal scriptorium. (Full article...)

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Did you know...

Streamlined Ocean Liner, Popular Science Monthly, 1934

... that Italian dictator Benito Mussolini tried to buy Norman Bel Geddes' 1932 design for a Streamlined Ocean Liner (pictured)?
... that violist Konstantin Sellheim recorded fairy tale music with the Sellheim-Kuti Trio, and played the premiere of the piano quartet Skylla and Charybdis by Graham Waterhouse?
... that humans and horses are dead-end hosts for the West Nile virus?
... that Clifford E. Charlesworth was a NASA Flight Director during the Apollo 11 Moon landing mission?
... that the upcoming film Avengers: Infinity War draws inspiration from the 1991 comic book The Infinity Gauntlet?
... that Lega Nord politician Toni Iwobi is the first black person elected to the Italian Senate?
... that Dai Prefecture and County carried on the name of a "barbarian" kingdom and Qin commandery, despite being in a completely different part of China?
... that Liberian president George Weah's son Timothy plays for the United States men's national soccer team?

In the news

The 10th hole at Augusta National Golf Club

In golf, Patrick Reed wins the Masters Tournament at Augusta National Golf Club (pictured) in the United States.
In the Hungarian parliamentary election, a coalition led by Prime Minister Viktor Orbán wins its third consecutive supermajority in the Hungarian National Assembly.
In German association football, Bayern Munich win the Bundesliga for the sixth consecutive season.
A crash involving a bus carrying the Humboldt Broncos junior ice hockey team kills 15 people in Saskatchewan, Canada.

On this day...

April 10

Big Ben

1815 – Mount Tambora in Indonesia began one of the most violent volcanic eruptions in recorded history, killing at least 71,000 people, and affecting worldwide temperatures for the next two years.
1858 – Big Ben (pictured), the bell in the Palace of Westminster's clock tower in London, was cast after the original bell had cracked during testing.
1944 – The Holocaust: Rudolf Vrba and Alfréd Wetzler escaped from Auschwitz; their report was one of the earliest and most detailed descriptions of the mass killings in the camp.
1992 – Nagorno-Karabakh War: At least 40 Armenian civilians were massacred in Maraga, Azerbaijan.
2009 – Fijian President Ratu Josefa Iloilo announced that he had suspended the constitution and assumed all governance in the country after it was ruled that the government of Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama was illegal.

Wilhelm Egon von Fürstenberg (d. 1704) · Samuel Hahnemann (b. 1755) · Jagjit Singh Lyallpuri (b. 1917)

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Today's featured picture

An 1860 lithograph showing the assassination of Riccardo, the Earl of Warwick, in the climactic scene of the opera Un ballo in maschera. Composed by Giuseppe Verdi, with a libretto by Antonio Somma, it was based on the assassination of King Gustav III of Sweden and initially intended to be performed as Gustavo III. However, after extensive censorship, the play was reset in the colonial United States and rewritten to center around a British governor in Boston. First performed in 1859, Un ballo in maschera has been widely staged, with many productions since the 1930s restoring the Swedish setting.

Lithograph: Francesco Corbetta; restoration: Adam Cuerden

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