Wikipedia:Main Page history/2019 March 7

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From today's featured article

Maurice Ravel (7 March 1875 – 28 December 1937) was a French composer, pianist and conductor. He is often associated with impressionism along with his elder contemporary Claude Debussy, but both composers rejected the term. After studying at France's premier music college, the Paris Conservatoire, he developed a style that incorporated elements of baroque, neoclassicism and, in his later works, jazz. Some of his piano music, such as Gaspard de la nuit (1908), requires advanced virtuoso technique. His complex orchestral work Daphnis et Chloé (1912) was commissioned by the impresario Sergei Diaghilev for the Ballets Russes. In 1922 Ravel made an orchestral arrangement of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition. He liked to experiment with musical form, as in Boléro (1928), his best-known work. A slow and painstaking worker, Ravel wrote fewer pieces than many of his contemporaries. He was among the first composers to use recordings to reach a wider public. (Full article...)

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Did you know...

Christ being handed a model cathedral

... that the 16 plaques called the Magdeburg Ivories (one pictured) were probably made around 968 to decorate an unknown cathedral fixture destroyed in the next century?
... that Saudi prince Khaled bin Alwaleed bin Talal is a vegan?
... that the 1994 Gambian coup d'état began as a mutiny that was only planned the night before its execution?
... that Yan Luguang and his colleagues built China's first tokamak?
... that the Central Committee on Women's Employment was founded to help British women who were out of work due to the First World War?
... that the tenor Ewandro Stenzowski went from early competition successes in Brazil to leading roles such as Rodolfo in La bohème at the Landestheater Detmold?
... that the OK gesture can stand for the evil eye, the letter F, the number 9, the rising and setting of the sun, or to signal that a scuba diver is safe?
... that merchant George Meade was once considered a patriot of the American Revolution, but his firm actually profited from both sides during the war?
... that the unstable limpet is essentially a parasite of the kelp Saccharina dentigera?
... that Philip Hugh-Jones coined the term type J diabetes, where J stands for Jamaica?

In the news

Tornado damage in Lee County, Alabama

A severe tornado outbreak hits the Southeastern United States, with one tornado causing at least 23 deaths in Alabama (damage pictured).
Heightened tensions remain between India and Pakistan after both countries conduct airstrikes.
Muhammadu Buhari is re-elected President of Nigeria.
Cardinal George Pell becomes the highest-ranking member of the Catholic Church to be convicted of child sexual abuse.

On this day

March 7

José Paranhos

1814 – War of the Sixth Coalition: Napoleon's army forced Mikhail Semyonovich Vorontsov's Russian troops to withdraw from the Chemin des Dames, but French casualties exceeded Russian losses.
1871 – José Paranhos, Viscount of Rio Branco (pictured), became Prime Minister of the Empire of Brazil, starting a four-year rule, the longest in the state's history.
1941 – The German submarine U-47, one of the most successful U-boats of World War II, disappeared and was lost with all hands.
1985 – The charity single "We Are the World" by the supergroup United Support of Artists for Africa was released, and went on to sell more than 20 million copies.
2009 – Two off-duty soldiers of the British Army's 38 Engineer Regiment were shot dead by the Real IRA in Antrim town, Northern Ireland.

Robert Townsend (d. 1838) · Mochtar Lubis (b. 1922) · Nicolas Dupont-Aignan (b. 1961)

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Today's featured picture

An African buffalo (Syncerus caffer) male with a cattle egret on its back, in Chobe National Park, Botswana. Cattle egrets accompany cattle and other large mammals, eating insects and ticks as well as small prey disturbed by the mammals as they graze.

Photograph: Charles J. Sharp

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