Wikipedia:Main Page history/2020 August 22

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From today's featured article

John W. Beschter (1763–1842) was a Catholic priest from the Duchy of Luxembourg who emigrated to the United States in 1807 to become a missionary of the Society of Jesus. He took up ministry in rural Pennsylvania, and was soon made the pastor of St. Mary's Church in Lancaster. As pastor, Beschter was praised by Archbishop John Carroll for ministering to Catholic congregations of three distinct ethnic and linguistic groups, and quieting a parochial dispute over the nationality and language of their pastor. In 1812, Beschter went to Maryland to become the master of novices at the new Jesuit novitiate in White Marsh. After two years, he returned to ministering in rural Pennsylvania and Maryland. He became the pastor of the German congregation of St. John the Evangelist in Baltimore, a position he held until 1828. The following year, he became the president of Georgetown College. After several months, he left the office, and returned to ministering in Paradise, Pennsylvania, where he lived out his final years. (Full article...)

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Mike Pompeo during the speech

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... that radio station WCCT-FM was started by the hotel and business management shop of Cape Cod Regional Technical High School in Massachusetts?
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In the news

COVID-19 pandemic

Alexei Navalny

Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny (pictured) is airlifted from Omsk to Germany for treatment after falling into a coma.
Keith Rowley is sworn in for a second term as prime minister after the People's National Movement wins the Trinidad and Tobago general election.
In Mali, President Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta resigns and dissolves the government after his arrest in a military coup following months of protests.

On this day

August 22

Skyline of Chennai

1639 – The Vijayanagara Empire leased a small strip of land in present-day Chennai (modern skyline pictured), the capital city of the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, to the East India Company.
1777 – American Revolutionary War: Benedict Arnold used a ruse to convince the British that a much larger force was arriving, causing them to abandon the siege of Fort Stanwix.
1864 – Under the leadership of Henry Dunant and the International Committee of the Red Cross, twelve European states and kingdoms signed the First Geneva Convention, establishing rules for the protection of victims of armed conflict.
2015 – A Hawker Hunter aircraft crashed at an airshow at Shoreham Airport, England, killing eleven people.

John Dudley, 1st Duke of Northumberland (d. 1553)
James Newland (b. 1881)
Denton Cooley (b. 1920)

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Today's featured picture

The Bagnio is the fifth of a series of six oil-on-canvas paintings by English painter and pictorial satirist William Hogarth, created around 1743. The series, entitled Marriage A-la-Mode, depicts an arranged marriage and its disastrous consequences in a satire of 18th-century society, and is now in the collection of the National Gallery in London.

In this picture, the young earl has caught his wife with her lover, the lawyer Silvertongue, and has been fatally wounded by him. The setting is the Turk's Head Bagnio in Covent Garden, originally a coffee house which offered Turkish baths (a bagnio), but by Hogarth's time it had become a place where rooms could be taken for the night with no questions asked. As the murderer makes his escape in his nightshirt through the window, the countess begs forgiveness from her dying husband. Meanwhile, the noise of the fight has awakened the master of the house, who appears through the door on the right with the watch.

Painting credit: William Hogarth

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