Article of the day for March 7, 2019

The Wikipedia article of the day for March 7, 2019 is Maurice Ravel.
Maurice Ravel (7 March 1875 – 28 December 1937) was a French composer, pianist and conductor. He is often associated with impressionism along with his elder contemporary Claude Debussy, but both composers rejected the term. After studying at France's premier music college, the Paris Conservatoire, he developed a style that incorporated elements of baroque, neoclassicism and, in his later works, jazz. Some of his piano music, such as Gaspard de la nuit (1908), requires advanced virtuoso technique. His complex orchestral work Daphnis et Chloé (1912) was commissioned by the impresario Sergei Diaghilev for the Ballets Russes. In 1922 Ravel made an orchestral arrangement of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition. He liked to experiment with musical form, as in Boléro (1928), his best-known work. A slow and painstaking worker, Ravel wrote fewer pieces than many of his contemporaries. He was among the first composers to use recordings to reach a wider public.

Article of the day for March 6, 2019

The Wikipedia article of the day for March 6, 2019 is Al-Mu'tasim.
Al-Mu'tasim (796–842) was the eighth Abbasid caliph. A younger son of Caliph Harun al-Rashid, he rose to prominence as a key lieutenant of his brother Caliph al-Ma'mun after forming a private army composed predominantly of Turkish slave-soldiers. When al-Ma'mun died on campaign in August 833, al-Mu'tasim succeeded him and continued many of his policies, including support for Mu'tazilism. The traditional Arab and Iranian elites were weakened in favour of a new elite drawn from among the Turks, while the government was centralized around the caliphal court and a new capital founded to house it at Samarra. Al-Mu'tasim also achieved lasting fame as a warrior-caliph by sacking the Byzantine city of Amorium in 838. The rise of the Turks would eventually lead to factional strife and the collapse of Abbasid power in the mid-10th century, but the slave-soldier system inaugurated by al-Mu'tasim would be widely adopted throughout the Muslim world for centuries to come.

Article of the day for March 5, 2019

The Wikipedia article of the day for March 5, 2019 is Resident Evil 5.
Resident Evil 5 is a third-person shooter video game developed and published by Capcom, and produced by Jun Takeuchi (pictured). It was released for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 consoles on March 5, 2009. The plot involves an investigation of a terrorist threat by counter-terrorist agents Chris Redfield and Sheva Alomar in Kijuju, a fictional region of Africa. It is the seventh major installment in the Resident Evil series, and the first designed for two-player cooperative gameplay. Critics described the game as closer to the action genre than the survival horror of other games in the series. Resident Evil 5 had a mostly positive reception, although it was criticized for problems with its controls. The game was re-released for Nvidia Shield, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One in 2016. As of September 2018, it had sold over 7.4 million units, making it Capcom's second best-selling game and the best-selling game of the Resident Evil franchise.

Article of the day for March 4, 2019

The Wikipedia article of the day for March 4, 2019 is John Adams.
John Adams (1735–1826) was a leader of the American Revolution and the second president of the United States (1797–1801). He was a dedicated diarist, and corresponded with his wife and advisor Abigail, recording important historical information on the era. As a lawyer, Adams was devoted to the right to counsel and presumption of innocence; he defied anti-British sentiment and successfully defended British soldiers against murder charges arising from the Boston Massacre. A political activist prior to the revolution, Adams was a Massachusetts delegate to the Continental Congress. He assisted in drafting the Declaration of Independence in 1776 and was its foremost advocate in Congress. As a diplomat in Europe, he helped negotiate the Treaty of Paris with Britain. Adams was the primary author of the Massachusetts Constitution in 1780, which influenced the United States Constitution.

Article of the day for March 3, 2019

The Wikipedia article of the day for March 3, 2019 is Liberty Head double eagle.
The Liberty Head double eagle is an American twenty-dollar gold piece struck as a pattern coin in 1849, and for commerce from 1850 to 1907. The eagle, or ten-dollar piece, had been the largest denomination authorized by the Mint Act of 1792, but Congress considered new denominations of gold coinage in the 1840s after the discovery of gold in California generated a large amount of bullion. The gold dollar and double eagle were the result. After considerable infighting at the Philadelphia Mint, United States Mint Chief Engraver James B. Longacre designed the double eagle. Only one 1849 double eagle is known to survive; it rests in the National Numismatic Collection at the Smithsonian. The coin was immediately successful; merchants and banks used it in trade, and it was struck until replaced by the Saint-Gaudens double eagle in 1907. Many were melted when President Franklin D. Roosevelt recalled gold coins from the public in 1933.

Article of the day for March 2, 2019

The Wikipedia article of the day for March 2, 2019 is Battle of Auberoche.
The Battle of Auberoche was fought during the Gascon campaign of 1345 on 21 October between a 1,200-strong force composed of English and local Gascons under Henry, Earl of Derby, and a French army of 7,000 commanded by Louis of Poitiers. It was fought at the village of Auberoche near Périgueux in northern Aquitaine. At the time, Gascony was a territory of the English Crown. The battle resulted in a heavy French defeat and they suffered very high casualties, with their leaders killed or captured. The battle took place during the early stages of the Hundred Years' War. Along with the Battle of Bergerac earlier in the year, it marked a change in the military balance of power in the region after the French position collapsed. It was one of a series of victories which would lead to Henry of Derby being called "one of the best warriors in the world" by a contemporary chronicler.

Article of the day for March 1, 2019

The Wikipedia article of the day for March 1, 2019 is Germanium.
Germanium is a chemical element with symbol Ge and atomic number 32. It is a lustrous, hard, greyish-white metalloid in the carbon group, chemically similar to silicon (Si) and tin (Sn). In 1869, Dmitri Mendeleev predicted the existence of germanium (and later some of its properties) based on its position in his periodic table (extract pictured). In 1886, Clemens Winkler discovered the element in a rare mineral called argyrodite. Mendeleev's predictions closely matched the properties of germanium, and this contributed to the wider acceptance of his periodic table. Germanium is a semiconductor used in transistors and various electronic devices, fibre-optic systems, infrared optics, solar cell applications, and light-emitting diodes. It is mined primarily from sphalerite (a zinc ore), along with silver, lead, and copper ores.