Wikipedia:Main Page history/2019 February 1

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From today's featured article

Tropical Storm Marco was the only tropical cyclone to make landfall in the United States during the 1990 Atlantic hurricane season. The 13th named storm of the season, Marco formed from a cold-core low-pressure area along the northern coast of Cuba on October 9, and tracked northwestward through the eastern Gulf of Mexico. Its circulation produced 65 mph (100 km/h) winds over the western portion of Florida before weakening to a tropical depression and moving ashore near Cedar Key. The cyclone combined with a cold front and the remnants of Hurricane Klaus to produce heavy rainfall in Georgia and the Carolinas. After interacting with the nearby Hurricane Lili, Marco continued northward until being absorbed by a cold front. In Florida, the cyclone triggered flooding of some roadways. Rainfall across its path peaked at 19.89 inches (505 mm) in Louisville, Georgia. The flooding caused 12 deaths, mostly due to drowning, as well as $57 million in damage. (Full article...)

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Did you know...

Loschbour man

... that DNA testing suggests that Loschbour man (pictured), an 8,000-year-old human skeleton found in Luxembourg in 1935, had dark skin?
... that Cemile Timur founded, played for, and now coaches a football club recently promoted to the Turkish Women's First League?
... that the recently rediscovered and restored 1898 short film Something Good – Negro Kiss counters racist caricatures?
... that Philip Petty received the Medal of Honor for raising his regiment's colors during the Battle of Fredericksburg?
... that a storyline about domestic abuse from the eighteenth series of Holby City sparked 177 calls to the BBC's support line?
... that Mamie Shields Pyle was instrumental in winning the right to vote for women in South Dakota?
... that green-legged curly-tail lizards living in more open, exposed locations, tend to have longer limbs and faster sprint speeds?
... that Zura Karuhimbi saved the lives of more than 100 refugees during the Rwandan genocide by pretending to be a witch?

In the news

Aftermath of the Jolo Cathedral bombings

Two bombs at the Cathedral of Our Lady of Mount Carmel (aftermath pictured) in Jolo, Philippines, kill at least 18 people and leave more than 80 others injured.
A mining dam collapses in Brumadinho, Brazil, leaving more than 110 people dead and hundreds of others missing.
More than 60 people are killed in flooding across South Sulawesi, Indonesia.
More than 100 Afghan National Security Forces members are reportedly killed in an attack on a military compound in Maidan Shar.

On this day

February 1: Black History Month begins in Canada and the United States; Fajr decade begins in Iran; National Freedom Day in the United States

Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir

1329 – The Teutonic Knights succeeded in their siege of a fortress in Samogitia, Lithuania, and baptized the defenders in the Catholic rite.
1411 – The First Peace of Thorn was signed, ending the Polish–Lithuanian–Teutonic War.
1960 – Four African American students staged the first Greensboro sit-ins at a lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina.
1972 – Kuala Lumpur gained city status, the first settlement in Malaysia to do so after the nation's independence from the United Kingdom.
2009 – Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir (pictured) became Iceland's first female Prime Minister and the world's first openly gay head of government of the modern era.

Francesco Maria Veracini (b. 1690) · Agda Meyerson (b. 1866) · N. D. Cocea (d. 1949)

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From today's featured list

Fatih, in Prussian service as König Wilhelm

In the 1860s and 1870s, the Ottoman Navy ordered or acquired a series of ironclad warships, built almost entirely in foreign shipyards. The first class, the four Osmaniye-class ironclads, were ordered from British shipyards in the early 1860s, and a fifth ship, Fatih (pictured), was ordered in 1864; this vessel was purchased by the Prussian Navy in 1867. That year the Ottomans ordered the ironclad Feth-i Bülend and the two-ship Avnillah class, all from Britain. In the meantime, the Eyalet of Egypt, a province of the Ottoman Empire, placed orders for several ironclads from French shipyards. Most of the Ottoman ironclads saw action during the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878. The rest of the ships served in the Black Sea, where they supported Ottoman forces in the Caucasus and in the eastern Balkans. One vessel, Lüft-ü Celil, was sunk by Russian artillery while patrolling the Danube. (Full list...)

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Today's featured picture

Hester C. Jeffrey (c. 1842 - January 2, 1934) was an African American activist, suffragist, and community organizer. She was a national organizer for the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs (NACWC), and helped create African-American women's clubs for such purposes as women's suffrage, helping women with small children, and to raise money for young black women to take classes at what later became the Rochester Institute of Technology. She also worked for the Political Equality Club, the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, and served on the Douglass Monument Committee.

Jeffrey was friends with Susan B. Anthony and was often seen at Anthony's home in Rochester, and was the only layperson to give a eulogy at her funeral service in 1906.

Unknown photographer, restored by Adam Cuerden

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