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Map of the area ruled by the Turabays

The Turabay dynasty was a family of Bedouin emirs who governed the district of Lajjun in northern Palestine during Ottoman rule in the 16th–17th centuries. The family's forebears had served as chiefs of Jezreel Valley during Mamluk rule in the late 15th century. During the Ottoman conquest of the region in 1516–1517, the family aided Ottoman sultan Selim I. The Ottomans kept them as guardians of the strategic Via Maris and Damascus–Jerusalem highways and rewarded them with tax farms. Although in the 17th century several of their emirs lived in towns, the Turabays largely remained nomads, camping with their tribesmen near Caesarea in the winters and the plain of Acre in the summers. The eastward migration of their tribesmen to the Jordan Valley, Ottoman centralization, and falling tax revenues brought about their political decline and they were permanently stripped of office in 1677. Descendants of the family continue to live in the area. (Full article...)

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On this day

August 21

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1689 – Jacobite clans clashed with a regiment of Covenanters in the streets of Dunkeld, Scotland.
1789 – The national colours of Italy first appeared on a tricolour cockade in Genoa.
1911 – Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa (pictured) was stolen from the Louvre by museum employee Vincenzo Peruggia and was not recovered until two years later.
1944 – World War II: A combined Canadian–Polish force captured the town of Falaise, France, in the final offensive of the Battle of Normandy.
2007 – BioShock was released in North America, becoming a critical success and a demonstration of video games as an art form.

Alphonse, Count of Poitiers (d. 1271)
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (d. 1762)
Thomas S. Monson (b. 1927)
Frederick Seguier Drake (d. 1974)

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Today's featured picture

Marie Curie (1867–1934) was a Polish and naturalised-French physicist and chemist who conducted pioneering research on radioactivity. Born in Warsaw, she studied in Poland until she was 24, when she moved to Paris to earn her higher degrees. In 1895, she married French physicist Pierre Curie, and in 1903 she shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with Pierre and physicist Henri Becquerel for their pioneering work developing the theory of "radioactivity" – a term she coined. She was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize. She won a second Nobel Prize in 1911, the first person to do so, for her discovery of the elements polonium and radium. Under her direction, the world's first studies were conducted into the treatment of neoplasms by the use of radioactive isotopes. During World War I, she developed mobile radiography units to provide X-ray services to field hospitals. She founded the Curie Institute in Paris in 1920, and the Curie Institute in Warsaw in 1932. This photograph of Curie was taken in around 1920 by French photographer Henri Manuel.

Photograph credit: Henri Manuel; restored by FMSky and Bammesk

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