Wikipedia:Main Page history/2020 November 13

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Edward Thomas Daniell was an English artist known for etchings and Middle Eastern landscape paintings. Taught by John Crome and Joseph Stannard, he is associated with the Norwich School of painters, who were mainly inspired by the Norfolk countryside. After graduating in classics at Balliol College, Oxford, in 1828, he was ordained as a curate in 1832 and appointed to a curacy in London in 1834. He became a patron of the arts, and a friend of the artist John Linnell. In 1840, after resigning his curacy and leaving for the Middle East, he encountered the archaeological expedition of Charles Fellows in Lycia, and joined as their illustrator. He contracted malaria and died from a second attack of the disease. He normally used a small number of colours for his watercolour paintings; his distinctive style was influenced in part by Crome, J. M. W. Turner and John Sell Cotman. As an etcher he anticipated the modern revival of etching that began in the 1850s. (Full article...)

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Andrew J. Stofan studying slosh dynamics

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... that Arkansas poet laureate Rosa Zagnoni Marinoni had her poems published in more than 900 U.S. and international publications?
... that the Hawaiian happy-face spider can change color based on its diet?
... that in a 2009 case, the U.S. Supreme Court held that a group of school officials violated the U.S. Constitution when they strip-searched a 13-year-old middle-school student?

In the news

COVID-19 pandemic: Disease; Virus; By location; Impact; Portal

Martín Vizcarra

Manuel Merino becomes President of Peru after Martín Vizcarra (pictured) is impeached and removed from office.
Armenia and Azerbaijan sign a Russian-brokered ceasefire agreement to end the Nagorno-Karabakh war.
In cricket, the Indian Premier League concludes with the Mumbai Indians defeating the Delhi Capitals in the final.
In stock car racing, Chase Elliott wins the NASCAR Cup Series.

On this day

November 13: Feast day of Saint John Chrysostom (Eastern Christianity)

Nevado del Ruiz

1642 – First English Civil War: The Royalist army engaged the much larger Parliamentarian army at the Battle of Turnham Green near Turnham Green, Middlesex.
1914 – Zaian War: Zaian Berber tribesmen routed French forces in Morocco at the Battle of El Herri.
1940 – Walt Disney's Fantasia, the first commercial film shown in stereophonic sound, premiered at the Broadway Theatre in New York City.
1966 – The Israeli military conducted a large cross-border assault on the Jordanian-controlled West Bank village of Samu in response to a Fatah land mine incident two days earlier.
1985 – Nevado del Ruiz (pictured) erupted, causing a volcanic mudslide that buried the town of Armero, Colombia, and killed approximately 23,000 people.

Theophilus H. Holmes (b. 1804)
Arthur Nebe (b. 1894)
Teodora Ungureanu (b. 1960)

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From today's featured list

Thomas Cole

British-born American artist Thomas Cole began painting portraits in 1822. In the ensuing years, he shifted his focus to landscapes. The founder of the Hudson River School art movement, Cole is widely regarded as the first significant American landscape painter. He was known for his romantic landscape and history paintings. One of Cole's first landscapes, Lake with Dead Trees (1825), was among those that first popularized his works in an 1825 exhibition. Most of his early works depict the wilderness, "the truly American forest", typically the Hudson River Valley and the Catskills where he resided. From 1831 to 1832, Cole traversed Italy; some of the classical ruins he visited made appearances in his paintings, such as Aqueduct near Rome (1832), Roman Campagna (1843), and Arch of Nero (1846). While in Rome, Cole formulated the concept for his most ambitious work yet: The Course of Empire, a series of five paintings following the rise and fall of civilization. Completed in 1836, the series reflects nostalgia for pastoralism and Cole's personal opposition to U.S. president Andrew Jackson. (Full list...)

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The round ribbontail ray (Taeniura meyeni) is a species of stingray in the family Dasyatidae, found throughout the nearshore waters of the tropical Indo-Pacific region. Reaching 1.8 m (6 ft) across, this large ray is characterized by a thick, rounded pectoral fin disc covered by small tubercles on top, and a relatively short tail bearing a single venomous spine. The ray is well-camouflaged when lying on the seabed; it is largely nocturnal, and preys on molluscs, crustaceans and bony fish. Mature females bear litters of up to seven pups, which are fed during gestation on "uterine milk", a product secreted by the walls of the oviduct. This round ribbontail ray was photographed in Lakshadweep, India.

Photograph credit: Rucha Karkarey; edited by John Harrison

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