Wikipedia:Main Page history/2020 December 1b

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From today's featured article

Jack Crawford (1 December 1886 – 2 May 1963) was an English first-class cricketer who played mainly for Surrey County Cricket Club and for South Australia. An amateur, he played as an all-rounder. Unusually for a first-class cricketer, Crawford wore spectacles while playing. He played Test cricket before he was 21 years old for England, and successfully toured Australia with the Marylebone Cricket Club in 1907–08. He played only 12 matches for England, although critics believed he had a great future in the sport and was a potential future England captain. After a dispute with Surrey cricketing authorities, he moved to Australia, but after another dispute, moved to New Zealand to play for Otago, though that relationship also ended badly. After service in the First World War, he returned to England and played a handful of games between 1919 and 1921. Although he continued to play cricket at a lower level, the remainder of Crawford's life passed in relative obscurity. (Full article...)

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In the news

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

Ryoya Kurihara

In baseball, the Fukuoka SoftBank Hawks defeat the Yomiuri Giants to win their fourth-straight Japan Series (MVP Ryoya Kurihara pictured).
Ingrida Šimonytė takes office as Prime Minister of Lithuania.
Argentine footballer Diego Maradona dies at the age of 60.
Douglas Stuart's debut novel Shuggie Bain wins the Booker Prize.

On this day

December 1: World AIDS Day; Great Union Day in Romania (1918)

Rosa Parks

1577 – Francis Walsingham, Elizabeth I of England's principal secretary and spymaster, was knighted.
1822 – Pedro I was crowned the first emperor of Brazil seven weeks after his reign began on his 24th birthday.
1918 – With the signing of the Act of Union, Denmark recognized the Kingdom of Iceland as a fully sovereign state in personal union through a common monarch.
1955 – In a key event in the civil rights movement, Rosa Parks (pictured) was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a public bus to a white man in Montgomery, Alabama, sparking the Montgomery bus boycott.
1988 – Five armed men hijacked a bus carrying thirty schoolchildren and a teacher in Ordzhonikidze (now Vladikavkaz, Russia), and were later given an Ilyushin Il-76 aircraft and ransom for the release of the hostages.

Muhammad III of Alamut (d. 1255)
Martin Heinrich Klaproth (b. 1743)
Jo Walton (b. 1964)

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Today's featured picture

The Portrait of Cardinal Niccolò Albergati is an oil-on-oak-panel painting by the Early Netherlandish painter Jan van Eyck, dating to the 1430s. It is of considerable interest to art historians because van Eyck's preliminary drawing survives. The work depicts Niccolò Albergati, an Italian cardinal and a diplomat working under Pope Martin V, as a visibly ageing cleric, his face seamed with deep lines below the eyes; it is accompanied by notes on the colours to be used in the final painting. A comparison between this drawing and the portrait shows that van Eyck changed several details, such as the depth of the shoulders, the lower curve of the nose, the depth of the mouth and the size of the ear. The finished painting hangs at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, while the drawing is in the collection of the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden.

Artwork credit: Jan van Eyck

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