From today's featured article
The Battle of Glasgow was fought on October 15, 1864, at Glasgow, Missouri , as part of Price's Missouri Expedition during the American Civil War . In late 1864, the Confederate leadership in the trans-Mississippi theater planned a campaign into the state of Missouri . Major General Sterling Price led the expedition, and hoped to capture St. Louis . The early defeat at Pilot Knob led him to abandon this plan. Price sent Brigadier General John B. Clark Jr. with two brigades on a side raid to capture a weapons cache at Glasgow. The Union garrison of Glasgow was commanded by Colonel Chester Harding Jr. , and was mostly composed of militia and men of the 43rd Missouri Infantry Regiment. After Confederate artillery fired on the Union position, the Union commander rejected a surrender offer; the main attack drove Harding's men back into the town and they burned 50,000 rations to prevent them from falling to the Confederates. They surrendered at 13:30. Clark paroled the Union soldiers and captured needed weapons. The Confederate column rejoined Price's army the next day. ( Full article... )
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Did you know ...
Chesmac running on a Telmac-1800 computer
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- ... that Samuel Barber said that he could not adequately play his own Piano Sonata ?
- ... that geographer Michael Chisholm and contemporaries became known as "Caesar's Praetorian Guard", in reference to their teacher Gus Caesar?
- ... that Anne Morrow Lindbergh tried to warn her husband Charles Lindbergh of the backlash that his antisemitic Des Moines speech would receive?
- ... that Rose Betts wrote the song "Driving Myself Home" as a joke after a blind date, only for it to go viral on TikTok?
- ... that an art critic felt that Rooms by the Sea was one of Edward Hopper's "strangest" works?
- ... that when Swedish soccer player Beata Olsson transferred from Florida to Florida State, she said that she did not really know about the schools' rivalry?
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In the news
C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan–ATLAS)
- The comet C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan–ATLAS) (pictured) is visible to the western sky after sunset.
- The Nobel Prize in Literature is awarded to South Korean poet and novelist Han Kang .
- The Nobel Prize in Chemistry is divided, with half awarded to Demis Hassabis and John M. Jumper for their work on protein structure prediction and the other half to David Baker for his work on computational protein design.
On this day
Draft-card burning in 1967
- 1529 – Ottoman–Habsburg wars: The siege of Vienna ended with Austrian forces repelling the invading Turks, turning the tide against almost a century of conquest in Europe by the Ottoman Empire.
- 1888 – The "From Hell" letter , allegedly from Jack the Ripper, was sent to George Lusk, the chairman of the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee in London.
- 1965 – Vietnam War protests: At an anti-war rally in New York City, David J. Miller burned his draft card (example pictured), the first such act to result in arrest under a new amendment to the Selective Service Act.
- 1979 – President Carlos Humberto Romero of El Salvador was overthrown and exiled in a military coup d'état .
- Razia Sultana (d. 1240)
- Marie-Marguerite d'Youville (b. 1701)
- Franklin Peale (b. 1795)
- Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji (d. 1988)
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Today's featured picture
 | Wheat Fields is a series of dozens of paintings by the Dutch Post-Impressionist artist Vincent van Gogh, borne out of his religious studies and sermons, connection to nature, appreciation of manual laborers and desire to provide a means of offering comfort to others. The series includes this 1890 oil-on-canvas landscape, painted at Auvers-sur-Oise and titled Wheatfield with Cornflowers, now in the collection of the Beyeler Foundation in Riehen, Switzerland. Painting credit: Vincent van Gogh Recently featured: |