Wikipedia:Main Page history/2021 April 24b
From today's featured articleThe Old Spanish Trail half dollar is a commemorative coin struck by the United States Bureau of the Mint in 1935. It was designed by L. W. Hoffecker, a coin dealer who had been the moving force behind the effort for a Gadsden Purchase half dollar, vetoed by President Herbert Hoover in 1930, and he sought another commemorative coin that he could control if authorizing legislation was passed. He chose the travels of Spanish officer Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca in the early 16th century. Though Hoffecker's hometown of El Paso, Texas, is featured on the coin, Cabeza de Vaca came nowhere near its site. Hoffecker purchased the coins from the Mint at face value and sold them to collectors, ostensibly on behalf of the local museum, but in fact for his personal profit, something he later denied before Congress. His design for the coin, featuring the head of a cow (the English meaning of cabeza de vaca), has brought mixed reviews from numismatic commentators. (Full article...)
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On this dayApril 24: Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day (1915)
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The Tomb of Nebamun is the burial place of a middle-ranking official from the Eighteenth Dynasty of Egypt who lived around 1350 BCE and worked at the vast temple complex near Thebes. The richly decorated tomb was discovered in 1820 by a young Greek, Giovanni d'Athanasi, an agent for the English Egyptologist Henry Salt. Portions of the plaster frescoes were hacked off the walls and sold to the British Museum the following year. This polychrome fragment depicts date palms, sycamore trees, and a pool teeming with life. D'Athanasi died in poverty without revealing the precise location of the tomb. Painting credit: unknown; photographed by Yann Forget |