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George Frideric Handel
George Frideric Handel

The music for three of the four operas written by the youthful composer George Frideric Handel (pictured) between 1703 and 1706, when he lived in the German city of Hamburg, is lost apart from a few orchestral fragments. Only the first, Almira, has survived complete. He was able to get Almira and the less successful Nero performed at Oper am Gänsemarkt, the opera house, during the temporary absence of the theatre's director, Reinhard Keiser. Handel's last two Hamburg operas, Florindo and Daphne, were not produced before Handel left the city. No music that can be definitively traced to Nero has been identified, although some of it may have been used in later works, particularly Agrippina, which has a similar plot and characters. Fragments of music from Florindo and Daphne have been preserved without the vocal parts, and some of these elements were incorporated into an orchestral suite first recorded in 2012. (Full article...)

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Cora Victoria Diehl
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Queen Liliʻuokalani of Hawaii
Queen Liliʻuokalani of Hawaii
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Battle of Antietam

The Battle of Antietam, also known as the Battle of Sharpsburg, was a battle of the American Civil War fought on September 17, 1862, between Confederate general Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia and Union general George B. McClellan's Army of the Potomac near Sharpsburg, Maryland, and Antietam Creek. Part of the Maryland campaign, it was the first field army–level engagement in the eastern theater of the American Civil War to take place on Union soil. It remains the bloodiest day in American history, with a combined tally of 22,727 dead, wounded, or missing. Although the Union Army suffered heavier casualties than the Confederates, the battle was a major turning point in the Union's favor. This 1862 illustration by Edwin Forbes shows the charge across Burnside's Bridge, which took place during the Battle of Antietam.

Illustration credit: Edwin Forbes; restored by Adam Cuerden

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