Wikipedia:Main Page history/2020 April 18

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From today's featured article

Bonville's coat of arms

William Bonville, 1st Baron Bonville (1392–1461), was a powerful landowner in southwest England. Undertaking royal service, he fought in France in the later years of the Hundred Years' War. In 1415, he joined the English invasion of France in the retinue of Thomas, Duke of Clarence, Henry V's brother, and fought on the Agincourt campaign. In 1437, King Henry VI granted Bonville the profitable office of steward of the Duchy of Cornwall, passing over and enraging Bonville's powerful neighbour Thomas Courtenay, Earl of Devon. His dispute with Bonville descended into violence, and the feud continued intermittently for the next decade. In 1453, Henry became ill and entered a catatonic state for eighteen months; Bonville generally seems to have remained loyal to the king, although his guiding motivation was to support whoever would aid him in his feud. In 1461, he took part on the losing side in the Second Battle of St Albans during the Wars of the Roses and was beheaded for it. (Full article...)

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Kimono from the Khalili Collection

... that a collection of kimono (example pictured) assembled by Nasser Khalili covers four periods of Japanese history?
... that an attack on Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi may have been triggered by protests against a 150-percent fee hike?
... that film director Garrett Batty wrote the script for The Saratov Approach while recovering from heart surgery?
... that local residents complained about "potentially hazardous waste" being dredged from Peel Marina on the Isle of Man in 2015, only for toxic cadmium to be found there five years later?
... that Josephus C. Vines, the former Prohibitionist mayor of Brighton, Alabama, shot and killed a man who was drinking on his doorstep?
... that although the alpine bartsia has a wide range in Europe and North America, it is known in the British Isles only from a few locations in northern England and the central Scottish Highlands?
... that Moldavian leader Nikita Salogor called for an expansion of the borders of Soviet Moldavia in 1946, which may have led to his removal from office later that year?
... that professional journalists commended a student reporter at Sacramento radio station KERS for refusing to reveal her source for a story about California governor Ronald Reagan not paying taxes?

In the news

Coronavirus pandemic

Southeastern US severe weather

Thirty-eight people are killed in a tornado outbreak (satellite image shown) in the Southeastern United States.
The High Court of Australia quashes the conviction of Cardinal George Pell for child sex abuse and orders his acquittal.
Cyclone Harold impacts the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, Fiji and Tonga, killing at least thirty people.

On this day

April 18

Robert Mugabe

1689 – Glorious Revolution: Provincial militia and citizens in Boston revolted, arresting officials of the Dominion of New England.
1738 – By royal decree, King Philip V established the Real Academia de la Historia, tasked with studying the history of Spain.
1949 – The Republic of Ireland Act 1948 came into force, declaring Ireland a republic and terminating its membership of the British Commonwealth of Nations.
1958 – Controversial American poet Ezra Pound was released from St. Elizabeths Hospital, a psychiatric hospital in Washington, D.C., in which he had been incarcerated for twelve years.
1980 – Robert Mugabe (pictured) took the oath of office to become the first prime minister of Zimbabwe upon the country's independence from the United Kingdom.

Ippolita Maria Sforza (b. 1446)
Justus von Liebig (d. 1873)
Martha Ripley (d. 1912)

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Today's featured picture

Marvel Science Stories was an American pulp magazine edited by Robert O. Erisman, which ran for a total of fifteen issues in two separate runs, the first between August 1938 and April 1941, and the second in the 1950s, when there was a boom in science-fiction magazines.

This picture is an illustration by Alex Schomburg from an interior page of the April–May 1939 issue of Marvel Science Stories, accompanying Harl Vincent's story "Newscast". Schomburg was a Puerto Rican commercial artist and comic-book illustrator whose career in the United States lasted over seventy years, creating many covers for comics in the 1940s, including those featuring Captain America, Namor, the Human Torch, and other superheroes. He later moved on to covers and illustrations for science-fiction magazines, astrology publications, and books, including the juvenile series Winston Science Fiction. Vincent, an engineer by profession, earned a second income by publishing more than seventy science fiction stories in magazines, mostly in the 1930s and early 1940s, but a few in the 1960s, late in his life.

Illustration credit: Alex Schomburg; restored by Adam Cuerden

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