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July 14

Greece celebrating their Euro 2004 win

The UEFA Euro 2004 final was the final match of Euro 2004, the 12th European Championship, organised by UEFA for the senior men's national association football teams of its member associations. The match was played at the Estádio da Luz in Lisbon, Portugal, and contested by Portugal and Greece. The two defences ensured that goal-scoring opportunities were limited, and the score was 0–0 at half-time. Greece scored the only goal of the match after 57 minutes when Angelos Basinas took a corner kick to Angelos Charisteas, who sent a header past goalkeeper Ricardo. Several pundits labelled Greece's tournament win the greatest upset in the history of the European Championship, with their pre-tournament bookmakers' odds at 150–1. Greece subsequently failed to qualify for the 2006 FIFA World Cup and did not successfully defend their European Championship in 2008. Portugal eventually won the European Championship in 2016. (Full article...)

July 14: Bastille Day in France (1789); Festino di Santa Rosalia begins in Palermo, Italy

Machu Picchu

• 1791 – The Priestley Riots, targeting religious dissenters such as Joseph Priestley, began in Birmingham, England.
• 1874 – A fire destroyed 812 structures and killed 20 people in Chicago, leading to reforms in the city's fire-prevention and firefighting efforts.
• 1902 – An expedition led by Peruvian explorer and farmer Agustín Lizárraga discovered the Incan city of Machu Picchu (pictured).
• 1950 – Korean War: North Korean troops began attacking the headquarters of the American 24th Infantry Division in present-day Daejeon, South Korea.
• 2003 – Valerie Plame's identity as a CIA operative was leaked to and published by journalist Robert Novak.

July 14

Happy Chandler (July 14, 1898 – June 15, 1991) was the 44th governor of Kentucky (1935–1939), a member of the U.S. Senate, the commissioner of baseball, and the 49th governor of Kentucky (1955–1959). In his first term as governor, he oversaw the repeal of the sales tax, replacing the lost revenue with new excise taxes and the state's first income tax, and helped improve the state's education and transportation systems. He resigned as governor so his successor could appoint him to the Senate. A fiscal conservative and disciple of Virginia's Harry F. Byrd, Chandler opposed parts of Roosevelt's New Deal and openly disagreed with the president's decision to prioritize European operations in World War II over the Pacific War. In 1945, he resigned his Senate seat to become the commissioner of baseball, succeeding Kenesaw Mountain Landis. He approved Jackie Robinson's contract with the Brooklyn Dodgers, initiating the racial integration of Major League Baseball. Photograph credit: Harris & Ewing; restored by Kentuckian Recently featured: The Death of Marat Village weaver Brooklyn Navy Yard Archive More featured pictures

July 15

Jacques Offenbach (1819–1880) was a German-born French composer, cellist and impresario. He is remembered for his nearly 100 operettas of the 1850s to the 1870s, and his uncompleted opera The Tales of Hoffmann. Beginning as a cellist and conductor, Offenbach first wrote small-scale one-act pieces, limited by theatrical licensing laws. These eased by 1858 when he premiered his first full-length operetta, Orphée aux enfers (Orpheus in the Underworld). La belle Hélène (1864) and other successes followed. The risqué humour (often about sexual intrigue) and gentle satire in these pieces, together with Offenbach's facility for melody, made them internationally known, and he was a powerful influence on later operetta and musical theatre composers. His best-known works were continually revived during the 20th century, and many of his operettas continue to be staged in the 21st century. The Tales of Hoffmann remains part of the standard opera repertory. (Full article...)

July 15: Marine Day in Japan (2024)

Psy

• 1799 – French soldiers at Fort Julien, near the Egyptian port city of Rashid, uncovered the Rosetta Stone, which was essential in the decipherment of ancient Egyptian scripts.
• 1870 – Following the transfer of Rupert's Land from the Hudson's Bay Company, Manitoba was established as a province of Canada.
• 1943 – The all-female Emilia Plater Independent Women's Battalion was formed in the Soviet Union's First Polish Army.
• 2009 – Caspian Airlines Flight 7908 crashed in northwestern Iran, killing all 168 people aboard.
• 2012 – South Korean rapper Psy (pictured) released his hit single "Gangnam Style".

July 15

Daniel Radcliffe

Thirty-seven awards from 101 nominations were won by Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2, a 2011 fantasy film directed by David Yates from a screenplay by Steve Kloves. The film received particular recognition for its acting – mainly that of Daniel Radcliffe (pictured) – its musical score, its production design, and its visual effects. It received three nominations at the 84th Academy Awards, including Best Visual Effects. At the 65th British Academy Film Awards, the film was nominated for Best Production Design, Best Sound, and Best Makeup and Hair, and won Best Special Visual Effects. It received four nominations at the 17th Critics' Choice Awards and won two awards. The National Board of Review selected The Deathly Hallows – Part 2 as one of its top ten films of 2011. (Full list...)

July 15

The bronze-winged jacana (Metopidius indicus) is a wader in the family Jacanidae. It is found across South and Southeast Asia. Like other jacanas, it forages on lilies and other floating aquatic vegetation, using its long feet and legs for balance. The sexes are alike but females are slightly larger and are polyandrous, maintaining a harem of males during the breeding season in the monsoon rains. Males maintain territories, with one male in the harem chosen to incubate the eggs and take care of the young. When threatened, young chicks may be carried to safety by the male under his wings. This bronze-winged jacana was photographed in Kumarakom on the shore of Vembanad, the largest lake in the Indian state of Kerala. Photograph credit: Charles J. Sharp Recently featured: Happy Chandler The Death of Marat Village weaver Archive More featured pictures

July 16

Automatic tube loader of B Reactor at the HEW

The Hanford Engineer Works (HEW) was a nuclear production complex in Benton County in the US state of Washington, established in early 1943 as part of the Manhattan Project during World War II. Plutonium manufactured at the HEW was used in the atomic bomb detonated in the Trinity test on 16 July 1945, and the Fat Man bomb used in the bombing of Nagasaki on 9 August 1945. DuPont was the prime contractor for its design, construction and operation. The land acquisition was one of the largest in US history. The construction workforce reached a peak of nearly 45,000 in June 1944. B Reactor, the world's first full-scale plutonium production nuclear reactor, went critical in September 1944, followed by D and F Reactors in December 1944 and February 1945, respectively. The HEW suffered an outage on 10 March 1945 due to a Japanese balloon bomb. The total cost of the HEW up to December 1946 was more than $348 million (equivalent to $4.1 billion in 2023). (Full article...)

July 16

Impact site on Jupiter of a Shoemaker-Levy 9 fragment

• 1377 – The ten-year-old Richard II was crowned King of England at Westminster Abbey.
• 1782 – Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's opera Die Entführung aus dem Serail premiered in Vienna, after which Emperor Joseph II anecdotally remarked that it had "too many notes".
• 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.
• 1994 – Fragments of Comet Shoemaker–Levy 9 began colliding with the planet Jupiter (impact site pictured), with the first impact causing a fireball that reached a peak temperature of 24,000 kelvin.
• 2004 – Millennium Park, a public park in Chicago, Illinois, and the world's largest rooftop garden, opened to the public.

July 16

Snake handling in Christianity is a rite performed in several churches in the United States. Originating in rural Appalachia, the first instance of snake handling was seen about 1910. Pentecostal minister George Went Hensley was prominent in the early development of the rite. Practitioners commonly quote the gospels of Luke and Mark to support the practice. Practitioners are also encouraged to lay hands on the sick, speak in tongues, and occasionally drink poisons. This photograph, taken by the American photographer Russell Lee in 1946, depicts snake handling at the Church of God with Signs Following, a Pentecostal church in Lejunior, Kentucky. Photograph credit: Russell Lee; restored by Adam Cuerden Recently featured: Bronze-winged jacana Happy Chandler The Death of Marat Archive More featured pictures

July 17

Cora Agnes Benneson (1851–1919) was an American attorney, lecturer, and writer. She graduated from the University of Michigan, earning a Bachelor of Arts in 1878, a Bachelor of Laws in 1880, and a Master of Arts in 1883, and was licensed to practice law in Illinois and Michigan. From 1883 to 1885, she traveled the world to learn about legal cultures and how they affected women. When she returned to the United States, she undertook a nationwide lecture tour to speak about her travels and observations. In 1886 Benneson briefly worked as an editor of West Publishing's law reports before taking up a history fellowship at Bryn Mawr College under then-professor Woodrow Wilson. In 1888 she moved to Boston, where she continued to write and lecture. She was licensed in Massachusetts in 1894 and opened a law practice. She was made a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1899 and elected secretary of its Social and Economic Science Section in 1900. (Full article...)

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

Russian imperial family, 1913

• 1850 – William Cranch Bond and John Adams Whipple took a daguerreotype of Vega, the first astrophotograph of a star other than the Sun.
• 1862 – The garrotting and robbery of British member of parliament James Pilkington led to a moral panic in London.
• 1918 – Russian Revolution: Tsar Nicholas II and his family (pictured) were murdered by Bolsheviks at Yekaterinburg.
• 1944 – Laden with munitions for World War II, two ships exploded at the Port Chicago Naval Magazine in California, killing 320 people and injuring more than 400 others.
• 2014 – Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was shot down over eastern Ukraine, killing all 298 people on board.

July 17

Bispira volutacornis, sometimes known as the twin fan worm or spiral fan worm, is a type of tube worm found in the shallow sublittoral zone of the eastern Atlantic Ocean. It grows in crevices and in stony areas and prefers areas rich in sediment but with low levels of illumination. Bispira volutacornis has a parchment-like tube with a mucoid outer layer which is often coated with mud or silt. The tube is usually concealed in a crevice and the worm can retract into the tube when disturbed. It feeds on plankton which it captures with its plumes. It also uses the plumes to gather sediment with which to expand the tube. This B. volutavornis individual was photographed in Arrábida Natural Park, Portugal. Photograph credit: Diego Delso Recently featured: Snake handling in Christianity Bronze-winged jacana Happy Chandler Archive More featured pictures

July 18

John Glenn (July 18, 1921 – December 8, 2016) was a United States Marine Corps aviator, astronaut, and politician. Before joining NASA, Glenn was a distinguished fighter pilot in World War II, the Chinese Civil War and the Korean War. In 1957, he made the first supersonic transcontinental flight across the United States. He was one of the Mercury Seven, military test pilots selected in 1959 by NASA as the nation's first astronauts. On February 20, 1962, Glenn flew the Friendship 7 mission, becoming the first American to orbit the Earth, and the fifth person and third American in space. After retiring from NASA, he served from 1974 to 1999 as a Democratic U.S. senator from Ohio. In 1998, Glenn flew on the Space Shuttle Discovery mission STS-95, making him the oldest person to enter Earth orbit and the only person to fly in both the Mercury and Space Shuttle programs. He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012. (Full article...)

July 18

Coronation of Pedro II of Brazil

• 1806 – A gunpowder magazine explosion in Birgu, Malta, killed an estimated 200 people.
• 1841 – Pedro II, the last emperor of Brazil, was crowned (depicted) at the Old Cathedral of Rio de Janeiro.
• 1949 – Francisco Javier Arana, the chief of the Guatemalan armed forces, was killed in a shootout with supporters of President Juan José Arévalo.
• 1984 – A gunman massacred 21 people and injured 15 others at a McDonald's restaurant in the San Ysidro section of San Diego, California.
• 2019 – An arson attack at the studio of Kyoto Animation in Japan led to the deaths of 36 people.

July 18

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July 19

John D. Whitney (July 19, 1850 – November 27, 1917) was an American Catholic priest who was the president of Georgetown University from 1898 to 1901. Born in Massachusetts, he joined the United States Navy at the age of sixteen. He became a Jesuit in 1872 and spent the next twenty-five years studying and teaching mathematics at Jesuit institutions in Canada, England, Ireland, and the United States. He became the vice president of Spring Hill College in Alabama before becoming the president of Georgetown. He oversaw the completion of Gaston Hall, construction of the entrances to Healy Hall, and the establishment of Georgetown University Hospital and what would become the School of Dentistry. Afterwards, Whitney became the treasurer of Boston College and then engaged in pastoral work in Philadelphia, Brooklyn, and Baltimore, where he became the prefect of St. Ignatius Church. (This article is part of a featured topic: Presidents of Georgetown University.)

July 19

Remnants of the Mary Rose

• 1333 – Second War of Scottish Independence: Scottish forces under Sir Archibald Douglas were heavily defeated by the English at the Battle of Halidon Hill while trying to relieve Berwick-upon-Tweed.
• 1545 – The English warship Mary Rose sank outside Portsmouth during the Battle of the Solent (remnants pictured).
• 1916 – First World War: The "worst 24 hours in Australia's entire history" occurred when Australian forces unsuccessfully attacked German defences at Fromelles, France.
• 1957 – The largely autobiographical novel The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold by Evelyn Waugh was published.
• 2014 – Gunmen perpetrated an assault against an Egyptian military checkpoint in the Libyan Desert, killing 22 soldiers.

July 19

The German Mission House

Ten locations in the Chatham Islands are listed on the New Zealand Heritage List. The Chatham Islands are an archipelago in the Pacific Ocean about 800 km (430 nmi) east of New Zealand's South Island, administered as part of New Zealand. Heritage New Zealand classification of sites on the New Zealand Heritage List / Rārangi Kōrero, in accordance with the Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga Act 2014, distinguishes between Category 1 ("places of special or outstanding historical or cultural significance") and Category 2 ("places of historic or cultural significance"). Nine historic places are located on the main island of Chatham, while one, Whaler's Cottage, is on neighboring Pitt Island. Two additional sites – Hunts Forge on Pitt Island and Zimmerman House at Waitangi West on Chatham – were initially listed as Category 2 sites, but were later destroyed and removed from the list. (Full list...)

July 19

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July 20

The Alpine ibex (Capra ibex), also known as the steinbock, is a species of goat that lives in the Alps of Europe. Its closest living relative is the Iberian ibex. They have brownish-grey coats and sharp hooves adapted to steep, rough terrain. Found at elevations as high as 3,300 m (10,800 ft), they are active throughout the year, primarily feeding on grass in open alpine meadows. Adult males, which are larger than the females, segregate from them for most of the year, coming together only during the breeding season, when they fight for access to the females using their long horns. The Alpine ibex has been successfully reintroduced to parts of its historical range, but all individuals living today descend from a population bottleneck of fewer than 100 individuals from Gran Paradiso National Park in Italy. The species has few predators and is not threatened, but it has very low genetic diversity. (Full article...)

July 20

Buzz Aldrin's bootprint on the moon

• 1651 – Wars of the Three Kingdoms: After crossing the Firth of Forth, English Commonwealth forces defeated a Scottish army at the Battle of Inverkeithing, opening the rest of the country to occupation.
• 1867 – The United States Congress established the Indian Peace Commission to seek peace treaties with a number of Native American tribes.
• 1917 – The prime minister of Serbia, Nikola Pašić, and the president of the Yugoslav Committee, Ante Trumbić, signed the Corfu Declaration, agreeing to seek the establishment of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes.
• 1969 – The Apollo 11 lunar module landed on the Sea of Tranquillity, where Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first men to walk on the moon six-and-a-half hours later (Aldrin's bootprint pictured).
• 2012 – A gunman carried out a mass shooting at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, killing 12 people and injuring 58 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

Ernest Hemingway (July 21, 1899 – July 2, 1961) was an American novelist, short-story writer and journalist. Known for an economical, understated style that significantly influenced later 20th-century writers, he is often romanticized for his adventurous lifestyle, and outspoken and blunt public image. Most of Hemingway's works were published between the mid-1920s and mid-1950s; these included seven novels, six short-story collections and two non-fiction works. His debut novel The Sun Also Rises was published in 1926. His wartime experiences as an ambulance driver on the Italian Front in World War I formed the basis for his 1929 novel A Farewell to Arms, and he drew on his experience as a journalist in the Spanish Civil War for his 1940 novel For Whom the Bell Tolls. Hemingway was with Allied troops as a journalist at the Normandy landings and the liberation of Paris. He was awarded the 1954 Nobel Prize in Literature. (Full article...)

July 21: Belgian National Day (1831)

Depiction of the Ciompi Revolt by Giuseppe Lorenzo Gatteri

• 625 – Paulinus of York was consecrated as the first Bishop of York by Justus.
• 1378 – Unrepresented labourers revolted and violently took over the government of the Republic of Florence (depicted), demanding that they be granted political office.
• 1946 – After weeks of unrest, rioters shot and lynched Bolivian President Gualberto Villarroel, desecrating and hanging his corpse in the streets of La Paz.
• 1959 – The inaugural International Mathematical Olympiad, the leading mathematical competition for pre-university students, began in Romania.
• 1977 – Libyan forces carried out a raid at Sallum, sparking a four-day war with Egypt.

July 21

Frances Clara Cleveland Preston (née Folsom; July 21, 1864 – October 29, 1947), seen here in 1886, was the first lady of the United States from 1886 to 1889, and again from 1893 to 1897, as the wife of President Grover Cleveland. She is the only first lady to have served in the role during two non-consecutive terms. Folsom met Grover Cleveland while she was an infant, as he was a friend of her father, Oscar Folsom. When her father died in 1875, Grover became the executor of her father's estate. He took care of Oscar's outstanding financial debts and provided for the well-being of Frances and her mother Emma. She was educated at Wells College, and after graduating, she married Grover while he was the incumbent president. When her husband lost reelection in 1888, they went into private life for four years and began having children. They returned to the White House when her husband was elected again in 1892, though much of her time in the second term was dedicated to her children. The Clevelands had five children, four of whom survived to adulthood. Cleveland involved herself in education advocacy, serving on the Wells College board, supporting women's education, and organizing the construction of kindergartens. She was widowed in 1908, and she married Thomas J. Preston Jr. in 1913. Cleveland-Preston continued to work in education activism after leaving the White House, becoming involved with Princeton University. During World War I, she was active in the movement for American involvement and advocated military preparedness. She died in 1947 and was buried alongside her first husband in Princeton Cemetery. Photograph credit: Charles Milton Bell; restored by Adam Cuerden Recently featured: Archive More featured pictures