Wikipedia:Main Page history/2019 December 5

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From today's featured article

Ciliwung, Batavia,
photographed by Meessen

Jacobus Anthonie Meessen (5 December 1836 – 14 November 1885) was a Dutch photographer who took more than 250 portraits and landscapes in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) between 1864 and 1870. He worked as a carpenter in the Indies before returning to the Netherlands in the early 1860s. Moving back to the colony in 1864, he documented its land and people, working mainly in Java and Sumatra. He also photographed Bangka, Belitung, Borneo, and Nias. When Meessen returned to the Netherlands in 1870 he went into partnership with Abraham Vermeulen and began disseminating his photographs. In 1871 he gave King William III an elaborately decorated album with selected images, now kept at the Royal Library of the Netherlands. Other photographs were published by J. H. De Bussy in 1875 and exhibited in Paris and Amsterdam. Collections of his albumen prints, some of which were hand-tinted or annotated, are held in four institutions in the Netherlands. (Full article...)

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Site of the Battle of Muster Green

... that the site (pictured) of the Battle of Muster Green in Haywards Heath was the farthest a Royalist army advanced through Sussex during the First English Civil War?
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... that Red Dead Redemption 2 was the highest-rated game on Metacritic in 2018?
... that despite fighting for more than two years to stop the other station from signing on, WGVL's last day on the air was also WSPA-TV's first?
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... that the otherwise inconclusive Polish–Bohemian War of 1345–1348 cemented Bohemian control of Silesia?
... that Kodama Naoko, creator of I Married My Best Friend To Shut My Parents Up, called the yuri manga series her first "light" work "in a long time"?
... that feminist Carole De Saram caused the closure of a Citibank branch?

In the news

Adil Abdul-Mahdi

The Power of Siberia pipeline begins operations, delivering Russian natural gas to China.
In Iraq, Prime Minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi (pictured) resigns amidst ongoing protests.
Luis Lacalle Pou of the National Party is elected President of Uruguay.
An earthquake in northwestern Albania kills at least 50 people and injures more than 900 others.

On this day

December 5: Krampusnacht in parts of Central Europe

Pope Innocent VIII

1484 – Pope Innocent VIII (portrait shown) issued the papal bull Summis desiderantes affectibus, giving Dominican inquisitor Heinrich Kramer explicit authority to prosecute witchcraft in Germany.
1757 – Seven Years' War: Prussian troops under Frederick the Great defeated Austrian forces at the Battle of Leuthen.
1945 – Flight 19, a squadron of five U.S. naval TBF Avenger torpedo bombers, disappeared in the area now known as the Bermuda Triangle.
1965 – The "glasnost meeting" took place in Moscow, becoming the first demonstration in the Soviet Union after World War II and marking the beginning of the civil rights movement in the country.
2005 – The Civil Partnership Act came into force, granting civil partnerships in the United Kingdom rights and responsibilities identical to civil marriage.

Ealhswith (d. 902) · Clyde Cessna (b. 1879) · Princess Alice of Battenberg (d. 1969)

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Today's featured picture

The Hunting of the Snark is a nonsense poem written by English writer Lewis Carroll between 1874 and 1876. The poem describes a ship with a crew of ten trying to find the Snark, an animal which may turn out to be a highly dangerous Boojum. Among the hunters is a beaver, which makes lace, and a butcher, whose only skill is in butchering beavers. This picture, the third of Henry Holiday's original illustrations for the poem, accompanies the following stanza:

Yet still, ever after that sorrowful day,
Whenever the Butcher was by,
The Beaver kept looking the opposite way,
And appeared unaccountably shy.

Illustration credit: Henry Holiday

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