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From today's featured article
The Dorset Ooser is a wooden head that featured in the nineteenth-century folk culture of Melbury Osmond, a village in the southwestern English county of Dorset. The head was hollow, thus perhaps serving as a mask, and included a humanoid face with horns, a beard, and a hinged jaw. Although sometimes used to scare people during practical jokes, its main recorded purpose was as part of a local variant of the custom known as " rough music", in which it was used to humiliate those who were deemed to have behaved in an immoral manner. It was first brought to public attention in 1891, when it was owned by the Cave family of Melbury Osmond's Holt Farm, but it went missing around 1897. In 1975 a replica of the original Ooser was produced by John Byfleet, which has since been on display at Dorset County Museum in Dorchester. This mask retains a place in Dorset folk culture, and is used in local Morris dancing processions held by the Wessex Morris Men on Saint George's Day and May Day. The design of the Ooser has inspired copies used as representations of the Horned God in the modern Pagan religion of Wicca in both the United Kingdom and United States. ( Full article...)
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On this day...
April 24
- 1558 – Mary, Queen of Scots, marries the Dauphin of France, François, at Notre Dame de Paris.
- 1918 – First tank-to-tank combat, at Villers-Bretonneux, France, when three British Mark IVs meet three German A7Vs.
- 1957 – The BBC first broadcast The Sky at Night presented by Patrick Moore
- 1968 – Mauritius becomes a member state of the United Nations.
- 2005 – Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger is inaugurated as the 265th Pope of the Roman Catholic Church taking the name Pope Benedict XVI.
- 2005 – Snuppy becomes world's first cloned dog.
- 2013 – A building collapses near Dhaka, Bangladesh, killing 1,129 people and injuring 2,500 others.
- 1802 – Napoleon Bonaparte signs a general amnesty to allow all but about one thousand of the most notorious émigrés of the French Revolution to return to France, as part of a reconciliary gesture with the factions of the Ancien Régime and to eventually consolidate his own rule.
- 1865 – Union cavalry troopers corner and shoot dead John Wilkes Booth, assassin of President Lincoln, in Virginia.
- 1943 – The Easter Riots break out in Uppsala, Sweden.
- 1945 – World War II: Battle of Bautzen: Last successful German tank-offensive of the war and last noteworthy victory of the Wehrmacht.
- 1954 – The Geneva Conference, an effort to restore peace in Indochina and Korea, begins.
- 1958 – Final run of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad's Royal Blue from Washington, D.C., to New York City after 68 years, the first U.S. passenger train to use electric locomotives.
- 1991 – Seventy tornadoes break out in the central United States. Before the outbreak's end, Andover, Kansas, would record the year's only F5 tornado.
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Today's featured picture
The
Madonna with Child (
Salting Madonna) is a painting by the Italian Renaissance master
Antonello da Messina, depicting the Madona holding the Child and wearing an ornate golden crown, held by angels over her head. It is housed in the
National Gallery, London. The name Salting derives from
George Salting, the collector who donated it to the gallery in 1910. (
Full article...)
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