A Lady Writing

A Lady Writing is a 1665 painting by Johannes Vermeer.  He is particularly renowned for making masterful use of light in his work. Almost all his paintings are apparently set in two smallish rooms in his house in Delft; they show the same furniture and decorations in various arrangements and they often portray the same people, mostly women.  He died poor and not very well known, and only 35 known works are attributed to him.

Arts in the Olympics

At the 1912 Stockholm Olympics, poetry was an official event.  Modern history's first written work to win an Olympic gold medal was "Ode to Sport," a prose poem by Georges Hohrod and M. Eschbach.  There were also medals in sculpture, painting, and music.  Hilariously, Hohrod and Eschbach did not exist; they were pseudonyms for Pierre de Coubertin, the man who founded the modern Olympics.  The 1948 London Olympics were the final artistic competitions at the games.

Upper Volta

Burkina Faso gained full independence from France on August 5, 1960, as Upper Volta.  It changed its name to Burkina Faso in 1984.

Ludlow Massacre

The Ludlow Massacre was a mass killing perpetrated by anti-striker militia during the Colorado Coalfield War.  Soldiers from the Colorado National Guard and private guards employed by Colorado Fuel and Iron Company (CF&I) attacked a tent colony of roughly 1,200 striking coal miners and their families in Ludlow, Colorado, on April 20, 1914. Approximately 21 people were killed, including miners' wives and children.

Henri Cartier-Bresson

Henri Cartier-Bresson was a French photographer best known for his work Images à la sauvette ("The Decisive Moment"), and his philosophy that there is an elusive instant when, with brilliant clarity, the appearance of the subject reveals in its essence the significance of the event of which it is a part

Cassini map

The Cassini Map or Academy's Map is the first topographic and geometric map made of the Kingdom of France as a whole. It was compiled by the Cassini family, mainly César-François Cassini (Cassini III) and his son Jean-Dominique Cassini (Cassini IV) in the 1700s.  The map was, for the time, a real innovation and a decisive technical advance. It is the first map to be based on a geodesic triangulation. Four generations of the Cassini carried out the work, taking more than 6 decades to complete.  Poor Cassini IV was imprisoned by the National Assembly for being royalist, but they still availed themselves of his map.

Amish beards

The distinctive Amish chinbeard comes from a command in Leviticus 19:27, but the lack of mustache is probably derived from an intention to avoid association with the military connotations of a mustache prevalent in British and German armies of the late 19th century.