Wikipedia:Main Page history/2020 February 7

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William McSherry (1799–1839) was a Catholic priest, a prominent leader of the Jesuits in the United States, and a president of Georgetown College in Washington, D.C. Born in western Virginia, McSherry studied at Georgetown and was educated for the priesthood in Rome, where he discovered significant, forgotten holdings in the Jesuit archives about the early European settling of Maryland and the language of Native American tribes. McSherry served as the first provincial superior of the Jesuit Maryland Province from 1833 to 1837 and laid the groundwork for the sale of 272 of its slaves. He then became President of Georgetown College, exchanging positions with Thomas Mulledy, who executed the sale as provincial. Upon Mulledy's suspension in 1839 over the slave sale scandal, McSherry again became provincial. Near to death, his term lasted just several months. In 2015, due to his and Mulledy's involvement in the slave sale, Georgetown University renamed McSherry Hall. (Full article...)

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Did you know ...

A. acetabulum caps

... that the alga Acetabularia acetabulum (pictured) resembles a green parasol?
... that hedge fund manager Jacob Gottlieb hired Status Labs to counteract negative news coverage of him over the closure of Visium Asset Management?
... that Wolfgang J. Fuchs, an early German comics scholar who co-wrote a 1971 standard work on the topic, translated Garfield and Mom's Cancer?
... that according to The Independent, KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps "renders the unimaginable evil of the camps relatable"?
... that Eric Bowen's paintings were inspired by tantra?
... that the studio building used by Oklahoma City radio station KJEM was the last structure that was demolished to make way for the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building?
... that Thomas H. Lee, who developed the vacuum interrupter at General Electric, won an Asian table tennis championship while in college?
... that the Austins Quarter of Newton Abbot in Devon, England, is named after a department store?

In the news

Donald Trump

The United States Senate votes to acquit President Donald Trump (pictured) of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.
The Malawian Constitutional Court annuls the results of the 2019 general election which re-elected President Peter Mutharika, ordering a fresh election.
At the British Academy Film Awards, 1917 wins Best Film, along with six other awards.
In American football, the Kansas City Chiefs defeat the San Francisco 49ers to win the Super Bowl.

On this day

February 7

Michael Jordan in training
with the Scottsdale Scorpions

1497 – Supporters of Dominican preacher Girolamo Savonarola collected and publicly burned thousands of vanity items such as cosmetics, art, and books in Florence, Italy.
1813 – Napoleonic Wars: Two evenly matched French and British frigates fought for four hours at the Îles de Los off the coast of Guinea, resulting in a stalemate.
1940 – Walt Disney's Pinocchio, the first animated feature to win a competitive Academy Award, debuted at the Center Theatre in New York City.
1984 – During the Space Shuttle Challenger mission STS-41-B, astronauts Bruce McCandless II and Robert L. Stewart performed the first untethered spacewalk.
1994 – Having retired four months earlier, American basketball player Michael Jordan (pictured) signed a contract with the Chicago White Sox to play baseball.

Alfonsina Orsini (d. 1520) · Henry Fuseli (b. 1741) · Herman Vandenburg Ames (d. 1935)

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From today's featured list

Kuvempu

The Pampa Award is a literary award in the Indian state of Karnataka. The award was established in 1987 by the government of Karnataka. It is the highest literary honor conferred by the Department of Kannada and Culture of the Karnataka state government, and recognises works written in the Kannada language. The award is named after the first Kannada poet, Adikavi Pampa. The award originally comprised a cash prize of ₹1 lakh (US$1,400), a shawl, a citation and a memento. The cash prize was increased to ₹3 lakh (US$4,200) in 2008. Prior to 1996, the awards were given for a best single work by a Kannada writer. Since then, the award has been given to writers for their lifetime contributions to Kannada literature. Since its inception in 1987, the award has been given to a total of 31 individuals. Kuvempu (pictured), the first recipient of the award, was honored for his work Sri Ramayana Darshanam (1949), a modern rendition of the Indian epic Ramayana. In 2015, Chandrashekhar Patil returned his award as a sign of protest against the assassination of the scholar M. M. Kalburgi. The most recent recipient is K. S. Nissar Ahmed, who was awarded in 2017. (Full list...)

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Today's featured picture

Rain is an oil-on-canvas painting by Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh, part of The Wheat Field, a series that he executed in 1889 while a voluntary patient in the Saint-Paul asylum near Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, France. Through his cell window on the upper floor, he could see an enclosed wheat field, and he made about a dozen paintings of it over the changing seasons. In this work, he represented falling rain with diagonal lines of paint. The style is reminiscent of Japanese prints, but the effect is stylistically personal to Van Gogh. Seen through his rain-splattered window, he shows its bleak aspect in November, with grey clouds overhead and the wheat already harvested. The painting is now in the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Painting credit: Vincent van Gogh

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