Wikipedia:Main Page history/2020 August 4

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From today's featured article

Thompson's plat of Chicago

James Thompson (1789–1872) was an American surveyor who created the first plat of Chicago (pictured), completing it on August 4, 1830. Born in South Carolina, Thompson moved to Kaskaskia in southern Illinois as a young man and lived in the area for the rest of his life. He was hired to plat settlements at both ends of the proposed Illinois and Michigan Canal in northern Illinois, including Chicago at the eastern end. Before Thompson's plat fixed its location, the word "Chicago" had been used for various places around the southwestern shore of Lake Michigan. The plat named the streets in the area and allowed its residents to obtain legal title to their property. Chicago incorporated as a town in 1833 and as a city in 1837. In addition to his surveying work, Thompson served as a probate judge, county commissioner, and officer in the Illinois militia during the Black Hawk War. His grave, which was originally unmarked, was given a monument by the city in 1917. (Full article...)

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Mughal nobleman on horseback, c. 1656

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... that director Patrick Creadon said he made the documentary Hesburgh in part because he was skeptical whether the work of Father Theodore Hesburgh "really lived up to his reputation"?
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In the news

COVID-19 pandemic

Juan Carlos I

Former King of Spain Juan Carlos I (pictured) goes into voluntary exile following a financial scandal.
After five months of court challenges, the People's Progressive Party, led by Irfaan Ali, is declared the winner of the Guyanese general election.
Former Malaysian prime minister Najib Razak is found guilty on all seven charges in the first trial related to the 1MDB scandal.
A series of attacks over disputed farmland in Darfur, Sudan, leaves more than eighty people dead and several villages destroyed.

On this day

August 4

Napoleon at the Battle of Lonato

1783 – Mount Asama in Japan began a climactic eruption, which exacerbated the Great Tenmei famine and led to thousands of deaths.
1796 – French Revolutionary Wars: Commanded by Napoleon Bonaparte (depicted), the French Army of Italy decisively defeated an Austrian brigade led by Peter Vitus von Quosdanovich at the Battle of Lonato.
1964 – Vietnam War: The National Security Agency falsely claimed that a U.S. Navy destroyer was attacked a second time by North Vietnamese vessels in the Gulf of Tonkin, leading Congress to authorize the use of military force.
1995 – Yugoslav Wars: The Croatian Army initiated Operation Storm, the last major battle of the Croatian War of Independence and the largest European land battle since the Second World War.

Harry Lauder (b. 1870)
Samuel J. Tilden (d. 1886)
Helen Thomas (b. 1920)

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Today's featured picture

This image shows Car 10 of the San Francisco cable car system photographed using strip photography, a technique that captures a two-dimensional image as a sequence of single-dimensional images over time. This technique can be implemented in various ways; in film photography, a camera with a vertical slit aperture can either have fixed film and a moving slit, or a fixed slit and moving film. One of the characteristics of strip photography is that moving objects are distorted based on the relative speed of their motion and the image capture. Slower-moving objects occupy more time, and thus appear wider, while faster-moving objects are narrower, as they occupy the slit for a shorter period of time. Stationary objects, particularly in the background, are rendered as a constant stripe.

Photograph credit: Dllu

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