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July 15

Flag of Manitoba

Manitoba is a province of Canada. Indigenous peoples have inhabited what is now Manitoba for thousands of years. In the early 17th century, English and French fur traders arrived and established settlements in the area. The Kingdom of England secured control of the region in 1673 and created Rupert's Land, which included present-day Manitoba, under the administration of the Hudson's Bay Company. Negotiations for the creation of the province of Manitoba commenced in 1869 but disagreements over the right to self-determination led to the Red River Rebellion. The resolution of the conflict and further negotiations led to Manitoba becoming the fifth province to join Canadian Confederation on 15 July 1870. Manitoba is Canada's fifth-most populous province. It has a widely varied landscape, from Arctic tundra and the Hudson Bay coastline to dense boreal forest, large freshwater lakes, and prairie grassland. Manitoba's largest city and capital is Winnipeg. (Full article...)

July 15: Statehood Day in Ukraine (2022)

SG-1000

• 1410 – The Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania defeated the Teutonic Knights at the Battle of Grunwald, the decisive engagement of the Polish–Lithuanian–Teutonic War.
• 1815 – Aboard HMS Bellerophon, French emperor Napoleon surrendered to Royal Navy captain Frederick Lewis Maitland, concluding the Napoleonic Wars.
• 1983 – Sega's first home video game console, the SG-1000 (pictured), was released in Japan.
• 2009 – A M_w 7.8 earthquake struck a remote region of Fiordland, New Zealand, the country's largest earthquake magnitude since the 1931 Hawke's Bay earthquake.
• 2018 – Croatian Mario Mandžukić scored the first own goal in a FIFA World Cup final in their defeat to France.

July 15

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern is a short play by W. S. Gilbert that parodies William Shakespeare's Hamlet. The main characters in Gilbert's play are King Claudius and Queen Gertrude of Denmark, their son Prince Hamlet, the courtiers Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and Ophelia. The play first appeared in the magazine Fun in 1874 after having been rejected for production by several theatre companies. Its first professional performances were an 1891 benefit matinée and an 1892 run at the Court Theatre in London of around 77 performances, with Decima Moore as Ophelia, Brandon Thomas as Claudius, and Weedon Grossmith as Hamlet. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was revived in London and New York over the next 20 years and occasionally thereafter. A review in The Times said: "There is more brilliance of merely verbal wit in this little play than in anything else of Mr. Gilbert's. ... It is really a very subtle piece of criticism, sometimes of Shakespeare’s play, sometimes of the commentators, sometimes of the actors who have played the great part." This ink drawing was created by Ralph Cleaver for a 1904 celebrity charity performance of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern at the Garrick Theatre in London. The drawing depicts various characters in the play and identifies the actors who portrayed them, including Gilbert himself as Claudius. Drawing credit: Ralph Cleaver; restored by Adam Cuerden Recently featured: The Blind Girl Wood stork Slime mold Archive More featured pictures

July 16

Trinity was the code name given to the nuclear test that saw the first detonation of a nuclear weapon. The code name was assigned by J. Robert Oppenheimer, the director of the Los Alamos Laboratory, after a poem by John Donne. It was conducted on July 16, 1945, as part of the Manhattan Project on the Alamogordo Bombing and Gunnery Range in the Jornada del Muerto desert. The test used a Fat Man bomb of the same design as that detonated over Nagasaki. The complex design of the implosion-type nuclear weapon required a major effort from the Los Alamos Laboratory, and testing was required to allay fears that it would not work. Its detonation (video featured) produced the explosive power of about 20 kilotons of TNT (84 terajoules). The test site is now part of the White Sands Missile Range. It was declared a National Historic Landmark District in 1965, and listed on the National Register of Historic Places the following year. (This article is part of a featured topic: History of the Manhattan Project.)

July 16

Phạm Ngọc Thảo

• 1790 – President George Washington signed the Residence Act, selecting a new permanent site along the Potomac River for the capital of the United States, which later became Washington, D.C.
• 1950 – Korean War: A Korean People's Army unit massacred 31 prisoners of war of the U.S. Army on a mountain near the village of Tuman.
• 1965 – South Vietnamese Colonel Phạm Ngọc Thảo (pictured)—an undetected communist spy—was reported dead due to injuries sustained during his capture, but it is generally assumed he was killed on the orders of military officials.
• 1990 – A 7.8 M_S earthquake struck the densely populated Philippine island of Luzon, killing an estimated 1,621 people.
• 2008 – A tainted milk powder scandal broke in China which ultimately involved an estimated 300,000 victims, the vast majority infants, with 54,000 hospitalized with kidney problems and six deaths.

July 16

Anne of Cleves (German: Anna von Kleve; 28 June or 22 September 1515 – 16 July 1557) was Queen of England from 6 January to 12 July 1540 as the fourth wife of Henry VIII. Anne outlived the rest of Henry's wives. Painting credit: Hans Holbein the Younger Recently featured: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern The Blind Girl Wood stork Archive More featured pictures

July 17

Claudette making landfall in Texas

Hurricane Claudette was the third tropical storm and first hurricane of the 2003 Atlantic hurricane season. A fairly long-lived July Atlantic hurricane, Claudette began as a tropical wave in the eastern Caribbean. It moved westward past the Yucatán Peninsula before moving northwestward through the Gulf of Mexico. Claudette remained a tropical storm until just before making landfall in Port O'Connor, Texas, on July 15, when it quickly strengthened to a strong Category 1 hurricane. Forecasting its path and intensity was uncertain, resulting in widespread and often unnecessary preparations. Claudette caused one death and moderate damage in Texas, mostly from strong winds, as well as extensive beach erosion. Because of the damage, President George W. Bush declared portions of South Texas as a Federal Disaster Area. Claudette also caused significant rainfall and minor damage in the Mexican state of Quintana Roo, as well as minor damage on Saint Lucia. (This article is part of a featured topic: 2003 Atlantic hurricane season.)

July 17: Constitution Day in South Korea (1948); World Emoji Day

A vehicle on the Manchester Metrolink

• 1453 – The Battle of Castillon, the last engagement of the Hundred Years' War, ended with the English losing all holdings in France except the Pale of Calais.
• 1918 – RMS Carpathia, which had rescued survivors of the 1912 Titanic sinking, was sunk by a German U-boat with the loss of five crew.
• 1948 – The Summer Olympics torch relay, nicknamed the "relay of peace", began in Olympia, Greece.
• 1992 – The Manchester Metrolink (pictured), the first modern street-running light-rail system in the United Kingdom, was officially opened.
• 1996 – TWA Flight 800 exploded in mid-air and crashed into the Atlantic Ocean near East Moriches, New York.

July 17

The clouded Apollo (Parnassius mnemosyne) is a species in the swallowtail butterfly family, Papilionidae, which is found in the Palearctic realm. It is a large butterfly, which inhabits meadows and deciduous woodland clearings with plenty of flowering plants, but cannot survive in denser forest. The species has white wings, on which thin black veins are found, with blackish fringes. The forewing has two black spots. Its abdomen, antenna and legs are black. The female lays whitish conical eggs with a granular surface. This clouded Apollo male was photographed at the top of Slivnica, in the Dinaric Alps of Slovenia. Photograph credit: Charles J. Sharp Recently featured: Anne of Cleves Rosencrantz and Guildenstern The Blind Girl Archive More featured pictures

July 18

Lieutenant-General Henry de Hinuber (1767–1833) was a Hanoverian army officer who commanded units of the King's German Legion (KGL) during the Napoleonic Wars. Initially serving in the Hanoverian Army, in 1782 he fought in the Second Anglo-Mysore War in India. He was present at the siege of Cuddalore. The French Revolutionary Wars began a decade later and Hinuber served in the Flanders Campaign. When Hanover was invaded in 1803, Hinuber offered his services to the British Army and was given command of the 3rd Line Battalion of the KGL before commanding a brigade in the Bay of Naples in 1809. He was promoted to major-general in 1811 and given command of a brigade in Lord Wellington's Peninsular War army in 1813. Hinuber commanded his brigade at the Battle of Nivelle in 1813 and then at the siege of Bayonne the following year, when he led the response to the French counter-attack. He joined the army of the new Kingdom of Hanover in 1816. He received his last command in 1831, of the 2nd Division of a corps of the German Federal Army, and died in Frankfurt two years later. (Full article...)

July 18

Nadia Comăneci on the balance beam

• 1290 – King Edward I issued an edict to expel all Jews from England.
• 1723 – Johann Sebastian Bach directed the first performance of his cantata Erforsche mich, Gott, und erfahre mein Herz in Leipzig.
• 1976 – At the Olympic Games in Montreal, Nadia Comăneci (pictured) became the first person to score a perfect 10 in a modern Olympics gymnastics event.
• 1989 – American actress Rebecca Schaeffer was shot and killed by Robert John Bardo, eventually prompting the passage of anti-stalking laws in California.
• 1995 – Selena's album Dreaming of You, instrumental in popularizing Tejano music, was released posthumously.

July 18

Painted bat

Kerivoulines are members of Kerivoulinae, one of the four subfamilies of Vespertilionidae, itself one of twenty families of bats in the mammalian order Chiroptera and part of the microbat suborder. Kerivoulines, or woolly bats, are found in Africa and Asia, primarily in forests and caves, though some species can also be found in grasslands, savannas, or wetlands. They range in size from the least woolly bat, at 2 cm (1 in) plus a 2 cm (1 in) tail, to the Kachin woolly bat, at 6 cm (2 in) plus a 7 cm (3 in) tail. The 30 extant species of Kerivoulinae are divided between two genera: Kerivoula with 26 species, and Phoniscus with the other four. (Full list...)

July 18

The Basilica of St Paul is a Catholic parish church located in Rabat, Malta. It is on the edge of the site of the Roman city Melite. The present church was built between 1653 and 1658, replacing a church which had been completed in 1578. It was constructed with funds from the noblewoman Cosmana Navarra, on plans prepared by Francesco Buonamici. The final stages were carried out completed by Lorenzo Gafà. It was elevated to minor basilica status in 2020. The church features a grotto, where according to tradition St Paul lived and preached during his three months stay in Malta in 60 AD. This photograph shows the church's front façade. Photograph credit: Diego Delso Recently featured: Clouded Apollo Anne of Cleves Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Archive More featured pictures

July 19

Site map of Great Wilbraham

Great Wilbraham is a Neolithic causewayed enclosure, an archaeological site near the village of Great Wilbraham in Cambridgeshire, England. The enclosure is about 170 metres (560 ft) across, and covers about 2 hectares (4.9 acres). Causewayed enclosures were built in England from before 3700 BC until c. 3500 BC; they are characterized by the enclosure of an area with ditches that are interrupted by gaps, or causeways. Their purpose is not known; they may have been settlements, meeting places, or ritual sites. The Great Wilbraham enclosure was first identified from aerial photographs in 1972. An excavation was begun in 1975 by David Clarke, with a planned five-year research programme, but he died in 1976 and his results remained unpublished. His archive of finds and records was reanalysed in the 2000s. The site was rich in finds, including Neolithic flint, pottery from periods from the Neolithic to the present day, and animal bone. The site has been protected as a scheduled monument since 1976. (Full article...)

July 19

Detail from The Day the Earth Smiled, with Earth as a pale dot between Saturn's rings

• 1845 – A fire in Manhattan, New York, destroyed 345 buildings, killed 30 people, and caused at least $5 million in damage.
• 1903 – French cyclist Maurice Garin won the first edition of the Tour de France.
• 1919 – Following Peace Day celebrations marking the end of the First World War, English ex-servicemen unhappy with unemployment and other grievances rioted and burned down Luton Town Hall.
• 1997 – The Troubles: The Provisional Irish Republican Army announced that it would resume its ceasefire, ending its 28-year campaign against British rule in Northern Ireland.
• 2013 – The NASA spacecraft Cassini took a photograph of Saturn with Earth in the distance (detail pictured), for which people were invited to "wave at Saturn".

July 19

The passion fruit is the fruit of a number of plants in the genus Passiflora. They are round or oval, and range from a width of 1.5 to 3 inches (3.8 to 7.6 centimetres). The fruits have a juicy edible center composed of a large number of seeds. This photograph shows two passion fruits of the species Passiflora edulis, one whole and one halved. The picture was focus-stacked from 22 separate images. Photograph credit: Ivar Leidus Recently featured: Basilica of St Paul, Rabat Clouded Apollo Anne of Cleves Archive More featured pictures

July 20

Sir William Gordon-Cumming (20 July 1848 – 20 May 1930) was a Scottish landowner, soldier and socialite. He was the central figure in the royal baccarat scandal of 1891. He joined the British Army in 1868 and saw service in South Africa, Egypt and the Sudan; he served with distinction and rose to the rank of lieutenant-colonel. An adventurer, he also hunted in the US and India. A friend of Edward, Prince of Wales, for over 20 years, in 1890 he attended a house party at Tranby Croft, where he took part in a game of baccarat at the behest of the prince. During the course of two nights' play he was accused of cheating, which he denied. After news of the affair leaked out, he sued five members of the party for slander; Edward was called as a witness. The case was a public spectacle in the UK and abroad, but the verdict went against Gordon-Cumming and he was ostracised from polite society. After the court case he married an American heiress, but their relationship was unhappy. (Full article...)

July 20

Forensic experts at the site of the Suruç bombing

• 1807 – French brothers Claude and Nicéphore Niépce received a patent for their Pyréolophore, one of the world's first internal combustion engines.
• 1951 – Abdullah I of Jordan was assassinated while visiting the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem.
• 1976 – The Viking 1 lander became the first spacecraft to successfully land on Mars and perform its mission.
• 1997 – USS Constitution, one of the United States Navy's original six frigates, sailed for the first time in 116 years after a full restoration.
• 2015 – A suicide attack (aftermath pictured) in Suruç, Turkey, for which Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) claimed responsibility, killed 34 people and injured 104 others.

July 20

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In general, pictures of the day are scheduled in order of promotion to featured status. See Wikipedia:Picture of the day/Guidelines for full guidelines.

July 21

Taylor Swift on the Red Tour in 2013

Red is the fourth studio album by the American singer-songwriter Taylor Swift (pictured). It was released in October 2012 by Big Machine Records. Swift designated Red as a breakup album and her last to be promoted as country music. The album incorporates styles of pop, rock, folk and country, and is composed of acoustic instruments, electronic synths and drum machines. Initial reviews mostly praised Swift's songwriting for its emotional exploration and engagement, but critics deemed the production inconsistent and questioned her identity as a country artist. Swift supported Red with the Red Tour (2013–2014). Red topped the charts and received multi-platinum certifications in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom. In the United States it spent seven weeks atop the Billboard 200. Red was nominated for Album of the Year at the 2013 Country Music Association Awards, and Album of the Year and Best Country Album at the 2014 Grammy Awards. (Full article...)

July 21: Belgian National Day (1831), Marine Day in Japan (2025)

Sirimavo Bandaranaike

• 905 – Louis III, Holy Roman Emperor, was captured and blinded during his attempt to restore Carolingian power over Italy by King Berengar I.
• 1877 – Much of central Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, was burned and looted during the Great Railroad Strike of 1877.
• 1960 – Sirimavo Bandaranaike (pictured) was sworn in as prime minister of Ceylon, becoming the world's first democratically elected female head of government.
• 1990 – The Taiwanese military ordered the deportation of dozens of illegal immigrants from mainland China in sealed boat holds, causing 25 deaths due to suffocation.
• 2007 – Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the final book in the popular Harry Potter series by J. K. Rowling, was released and sold 15 million copies in its first 24 hours, making it the fastest-selling book in history.

July 21

One Direction performing at Soldier Field in Chicago on 23 August 2015

English-Irish boy band One Direction have released five studio albums, seventeen singles, and numerous music videos between 2011 and 2015, becoming one of the most commercially successful groups of the 2010s. Formed during the seventh series of The X Factor in 2010 and signed to Simon Cowell's Syco Records, the band quickly rose to international fame. Their debut single, "What Makes You Beautiful", was a global hit, followed by chart-topping albums Up All Night, Take Me Home, and Midnight Memories. The latter made them the first band ever to have their first three albums debut at number one on the Billboard 200. They extended this streak with their fourth album, Four, and capped their discography with Made in the A.M. in 2015 before going on an indefinite hiatus. (Full list...)

July 21

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In general, pictures of the day are scheduled in order of promotion to featured status. See Wikipedia:Picture of the day/Guidelines for full guidelines.

July 22

The hippocampus is a major component of the brain of humans and many other vertebrates. It plays important roles in the consolidation of information from short-term memory to long-term memory, and in spatial memory that enables navigation. In humans and other primates, the hippocampus is located in the archicortex, one of the three regions of allocortex, in each hemisphere. The hippocampus is a structure found in all vertebrates. In Alzheimer's disease (and other forms of dementia), the hippocampus is one of the first regions of the brain to suffer damage; short-term memory loss and disorientation are included among the early symptoms. Damage to the hippocampus can also result from oxygen starvation, encephalitis or medial temporal lobe epilepsy. Since different neuronal cell types are neatly organized into layers in the hippocampus, it has frequently been used as a model system for studying neurophysiology. (Full article...)

July 22: Feast day of Saint Mary Magdalene (Christianity)

Stanley Forman

• 1802 – Gia Long conquered Hanoi and unified modern-day Vietnam, which had experienced centuries of feudal warfare.
• 1817 – Windham William Sadler made the first successful aerial crossing of the Irish Sea, by balloon.
• 1975 – Stanley Forman (pictured) took the Pulitzer Prize–winning photo Fire Escape Collapse, which spurred action to improve the safety of fire escapes across the United States.
• 1997 – Written and illustrated by Eiichiro Oda, One Piece, the best-selling manga series in history, debuted in Weekly Shōnen Jump.
• 2002 – The Israel Defense Forces bombed the home of Salah Shehade, the leader of the military arm of the Palestinian organization Hamas, killing him, his family and neighboring civilians.

July 22

The featured picture for this day has not yet been chosen.

In general, pictures of the day are scheduled in order of promotion to featured status. See Wikipedia:Picture of the day/Guidelines for full guidelines.