From today's featured article
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The Waddesdon Bequest is a collection, left to the British Museum in Baron Ferdinand Rothschild's will in 1898, taken from his New Smoking Room at Waddesdon Manor. It includes almost 300 pieces of jewellery, plate, enamel, carvings, glass and maiolica. Earlier than most objects is the Holy Thorn Reliquary, probably created in the 1390s in Paris for John, Duke of Berry. The wide-ranging collection is in the tradition of a treasure house, such as those owned by the Renaissance princes of Europe. Most of the objects are from late Renaissance Europe; there are several important medieval pieces, and outliers from classical antiquity and medieval Syria. Rothschild selected intricate, superbly executed, highly decorated and rather ostentatious works of the Late Gothic, Renaissance and Mannerist periods for this collection. Few of the objects relied on the Baroque sculptural movement for their effect, though several come from periods and places where many Baroque pieces were being made. A new display for the collection, which under the terms of the bequest must be kept and displayed together, opened in 2015. (Full article...)
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Did you know...
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 Victor Milner and Madeleine Carroll
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In the news
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 Emirates A6-EMW in 2009
- The Summer Olympics open in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
- A firefighter is killed, but all 300 passengers and crew escape, after an Emirates Boeing 777 (pictured) crash-lands and catches fire at Dubai International Airport.
- Flooding in Assam, India, kills 28 people, affects 1.6 million others and submerges Kaziranga National Park, a World Heritage Site.
- In golf, Jimmy Walker wins the PGA Championship.
- American skydiver Luke Aikins performs a 25,000-foot (7,600 m) free fall from an aircraft and lands on a ground net.
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On this day...
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August 6: Feast of the Transfiguration (Gregorian calendar); Independence Day in Jamaica (1962)
 Meteorite fragment ALH 84001
- 1506 – Muscovite–Lithuanian Wars: The Grand Duchy of Lithuania achieved one of the greatest Lithuanian victories against the Tatars in the Battle of Kletsk.
- 1777 – American Revolutionary War: The Battle of Oriskany, one of the bloodiest battles in the North American theater of the war, was fought about six miles (10 km) east of Fort Stanwix, New York.
- 1806 – The Holy Roman Empire was dissolved by its last emperor, Francis II, during the aftermath of the War of the Third Coalition.
- 1956 – DuMont, one of the world's first television networks, aired its last program.
- 1996 – NASA announced that the meteorite known as ALH 84001 (pictured), discovered in the Allan Hills of Antarctica, may contain evidence of life on Mars, but further tests were inconclusive.
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