Wikipedia:Main Page history/2020 May 6

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From today's featured article

Cover of the first issue

Unknown was an American pulp fantasy fiction magazine, published from 1939 to 1943 and edited by John W. Campbell. Unknown was a companion to Astounding Science Fiction, also edited by Campbell; many authors and illustrators contributed to both. Campbell wanted to publish a fantasy magazine with more finesse and humor than Weird Tales, the leading fantasy magazine in the 1930s. Campbell required his authors to avoid simplistic horror fiction and insisted that the fantasy elements be developed logically. Notable stories included several well-received novels by L. Ron Hubbard and Fritz Leiber's "Two Sought Adventure", the first in his Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser series. Unknown was forced to a bimonthly schedule in 1941 by poor sales, and cancelled in 1943 when wartime paper shortages forced Campbell to choose between turning Astounding into a bimonthly or ending Unknown. The magazine is generally regarded as the finest fantasy fiction magazine ever published, despite the fact that it was not commercially successful. (Full article...)

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Christopher Dresser jug by William Ault

... that the Ault Pottery is best known for making designs by Christopher Dresser (example pictured), some using second-hand moulds?
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... that a wall and a statue of Mary that survived the World War II bombing of St. Kolumba in Cologne have been incorporated into a chapel within the Kolumba art museum?
... that Judy McClintock and her brother Joel were the first pair of siblings to win Water Ski World Championship titles?
... that KILO's broadcast license allowed the University of North Dakota to get out of the commercial broadcasting business?
... that the New South Wales Governor's Body Guard of Light Horse seemed to have been absent when Governor William Bligh was arrested during the Rum Rebellion?
... that Pacific Mall in Ontario, Canada, is the largest indoor Asian shopping mall in North America?
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In the news

COVID-19 pandemic

Netanyahu and Gantz

Canada bans the sale of assault-style firearms after a mass killing in Nova Scotia leaves twenty-two victims dead.
After seventeen months of stalemate, the Likud and Blue and White parties reach an agreement for Benjamin Netanyahu and Benny Gantz (pictured) to share power in Israel.
In the South Korean legislative election, the ruling Democratic Party and their allies increase their majority in the National Assembly.

On this day

May 6

Universal Newsreel of the Hindenburg disaster

1536 – Spanish conquest of Peru: Sapa Inca emperor Manco Inca Yupanqui's army began a ten-month siege of Cusco against a garrison of Spanish conquistadors and Indian auxiliaries led by Hernando Pizarro.
1782 – Construction began on the Grand Palace in Bangkok, the official residence of the king of Thailand.
1937 – The German airship Hindenburg caught fire and was destroyed (newsreel featured) during an attempt to dock at Lakehurst Naval Air Station in New Jersey, killing 36 people.
1941 – American entertainer Bob Hope performed his first show with the United Service Organizations, beginning a career that lasted 50 years.
2010 – Exacerbated by high-frequency traders using strategies that have since been banned, major U.S. stock indices dropped nearly 9 percent and quickly rebounded.

Pope Marcellus II (b. 1501)
Jean Senebier (b. 1742)
Novera Ahmed (d. 2015)

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Today's featured picture

Silver certificates were issued by the Republic of Cuba between 1934 and 1949. Prior and subsequent issues of Cuban banknotes were engraved and printed by non-governmental private banknote companies in the United States, but the series from 1934 to 1949 was designed, engraved, and printed by the Bureau of Engraving and Printing of the U.S. government.

This is a certified proof of a one-hundred-peso silver certificate, prepared in 1936. The obverse depicts Cuban patriot Francisco Vicente Aguilera, with the engraved signatures of Ricardo Ponce (Secretary of the Treasury) and José Agripino Barnet (President of the Republic). The reverse, printed in purple, bears the Cuban coat of arms, flanked by Havana's El Capitolio on the left and Plaza de la Catedral on the right. This proof is part of the National Numismatic Collection at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History.

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Banknote design credit: Bureau of Engraving and Printing; engraved by William Ford; photographed by Andrew Shiva

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