Wikipedia:Main Page history/2021 December 18

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From today's featured article

The Surrogate's Courthouse is a historic building at the northwest corner of Chambers and Centre Streets in New York City. A seven-story, steel-framed structure in the Beaux Arts style, with a granite facade and elaborate marble interiors, it was completed in 1907. John Rochester Thomas created the original plans while Arthur J. Horgan and Vincent J. Slattery oversaw the building's completion. The exterior is decorated with fifty-four sculptures by Philip Martiny and Henry Kirke Bush-Brown, as well as three-story Corinthian-style colonnades on Chambers and Reade Streets. The building's basement houses the New York City Municipal Archives. The fifth floor contains the surrogate's court for New York County, which handles probate and estate proceedings for the New York State Unified Court System. The Surrogate's Courthouse is listed on the National Register of Historic Places as a National Historic Landmark, and its facade and interior are both New York City designated landmarks. (Full article...)

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In the news

Siaosi Sovaleni

Siaosi Sovaleni (pictured) is elected as prime minister by the Legislative Assembly of Tonga.
A fuel tanker truck explodes in Cap-Haïtien, Haiti, killing at least 75 people.
In Canadian football, the Winnipeg Blue Bombers defeat the Hamilton Tiger-Cats to win the Grey Cup.
In motor racing, Max Verstappen wins the Formula One World Championship, while Mercedes win the constructors' title.

On this day

December 18: National Day in Qatar (1878)

Gaston de Chasseloup-Laubat

1499 – Muslims in Granada began a rebellion against their Castilian rulers in response to forced conversions to Catholicism.
1898 – Gaston de Chasseloup-Laubat (pictured) set the first official land speed record, averaging 63.15 km/h (39.24 mph) over 1 km (0.62 mi) in Achères, France.
1916 – The French defeated German forces around the city of Verdun-sur-Meuse in northeast France, ending the longest and one of the bloodiest battles in the First World War.
1963 – Ghanaian and other African students organized a protest in Moscow's Red Square in response to the alleged murder of medical student Edmund Assare-Addo.
1996 – The school board of Oakland, California, passed a controversial resolution officially declaring African-American Vernacular English to be a separate language or dialect.

Henrietta Edwards (b. 1849)
Robert Moses (b. 1888)
Noriko Matsueda (b. 1971)

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Today's featured picture

The Contrabandista is a two-act comic opera by Arthur Sullivan and F. C. Burnand. It premiered at St. George's Hall in London on 18 December 1867 under the management of Thomas German Reed for a run of 72 performances; this poster was produced to advertise the original production. There were brief revivals in Manchester in 1874 and the United States in 1880. In 1894, it was revised into a new opera, The Chieftain, with a completely different second act. The work was the first of Sullivan's full-length operas to be produced. It was not a great success, with Burnand's libretto coming in for the most criticism, but its music exhibits many of the qualities and techniques that Sullivan would employ in composing his twenty further comic operas, including the famous series of fourteen Gilbert and Sullivan operas produced between 1871 and 1896.

Poster credit: Robert Jacob Hamerton; restored by Adam Cuerden

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