Wikipedia:Picture of the day/October 2007

Lát'ọwọ́ Wikipedia, ìwé ìmọ̀ ọ̀fẹ́
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Slavery in the United States

Scars of a whipped slave named Peter, Louisiana, 1863. In his own words, "Overseer Artayou Carrier whipped me. I was two months in bed sore from the whipping. My master come after I was whipped; he discharged the overseer."

Slavery in the United States began soon after the English colonists first settled in North America. From about the 1640s until 1865, people of African descent were legally enslaved within the boundaries of the present U.S. mostly by whites, but also by a comparatively tiny number of American Indians and free blacks. By 1860, the slave population in the U.S. had grown to 4 million.

Photo credit: Unknown
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Alluvial fan

A vast alluvial fan blossoms across the desolate landscape between the Kunlun and Altun mountain ranges that form the southern border of the Taklamakan Desert in China's Xinjiang Province. The left side is the active part of the fan, and appears blue from water currently flowing in the many small streams.

Photo credit: ASTER
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Endurance (crater)

This approximate true-color image taken by the panoramic camera on the Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity shows the 130-meter (427 ft) wide impact crater known as "Endurance". This image mosaic consists of a total of 258 individual images.

Photo credit: Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity
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Locust

The Egyptian Grasshopper (Anacridium aegyptium) is one of a dozen species that may be called a locust during its swarming phase. Common in the southern Europe and around Mediterranean, it may be found in trees and shrubs of warm, dry areas. Similar to the gregarious phase of the desert locust (Locusta migratoria), it is clearly distinguished by the stripped eyes and, unlike that species, causes little damage. This female is about 8 centimetres (3.1 in) in length and was found in Lisbon, Portugal.

Photo credit: Joaquim Alves Gaspar
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Bougainville campaign (1943–45)

U.S. Army soldiers during the Bougainville campaign (in the Solomon Islands) during World War II. Japanese forces tried infiltrating the U.S. lines at night; at dawn, the U.S. soldiers would clear them out. In this picture, infantrymen are advancing in the cover of an M4 Sherman tank.

Photo credit: United States Army
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Maslenitsa

Maslenitsa, a 1919 painting depicting the carnival of the same name, which takes places the last week before Great Lent. The painting encompasses a broad range of things associated with Russia, such as snowy winter weather, a troika, an Orthodox church with onion domes. On the right is a theatre with a wrestling poster. On the left is a pub advertising "cheese" and "caviar".

Artist: Boris Kustodiev
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Great white shark

A great white shark (Carcharodon carcharias) swims among a shoal of mackerel at Isla Guadalupe, Mexico. Also known as a "white shark", this specimen is estimated at 12 feet (3.7 m) in length, age unknown. Great white sharks have a reputation as ferocious predators is well-earned, yet they are not indiscriminate "eating machines". Although the 1975 film Jaws provided the shark with the image of a "man eater" in the public mind, they typically do not target humans as prey.

Photo credit: Terry Goss
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Einsatzgruppen

A member of Einsatzgruppe D is just about to shoot a Jewish man kneeling before a filled mass grave in Vinnitsa, Ukraine, in 1942. Inscribed on the back are the words, "The last Jew in Vinnitsa". The photograph was found on an unidentified German soldier in 1943. Present in the background are members of the German Army, the German Labor Service, and the Hitler Youth. The Einsatzgruppen were paramilitary groups operated by the SS before and during World War II. According to their own records, they were responsible for killing over one million Jewish people, almost exclusively civilians.

Photo credit: Unknown, courtesy of the USHMM
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Thespis

Detail from "The Pantomimes" by D.H. Friston from the January 6, 1872 Illustrated London News, showing a scene from Thespis, the first Gilbert and Sullivan opera. This is one of the few surviving contemporary images of the production.

Illustration credit: D.H. Friston
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Dust Bowl

Buried machinery in a barn lot, Dallas, South Dakota, United States, due to Dust Bowl conditions, May 1936. Dust storms from 1930–1939 caused major ecological and agricultural damage to American and Canadian prairie lands. This ecological disaster was a result of drought conditions coupled with decades of extensive farming using techniques that promoted erosion.

Photo credit: Sloan, USDA
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Sami people

A Sami family in Norway around 1900. Also known as Lapps, the Sami are among the largest group of indigenous peoples of Europe, inhabiting Sápmi, which today encompasses parts of northern Sweden, Norway, Finland and the Kola Peninsula of Russia. This image is a photochrom (a hand-coloured monochrome plate), a common practise at the time.

Photo credit: Detroit Publishing Co.
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Military camouflage

Hospital Corpsman 2nd Class Alonzo Gonzales with Kilo Company, 3rd Battalion, 3rd Marine Regiment, walks through an alley in Methar Lam, Afghanistan, looking for signs of sickness or disease. His clothing is patterned with MARPAT, a modern form of military camouflage.

Photo credit: Cpl. James L. Yarboro, USMC
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Soyuz TMA-9

The Soyuz TMA-9 mission on the Soyuz rocket launches from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, September 18, 2006 carrying a new crew to the International Space Station. The spaceflight was the first time since before the Columbia accident that twelve humans have been in space simultaneously; three aboard the International Space Station (Expedition 13), three aboard Soyuz TMA-9, and six aboard Space Shuttle Atlantis, flying mission STS-115. The observer in the lower right gives a distorted sense of scale because the rocket is actually 46.1 metres (151.2 ft) tall, although it appears to be much smaller here.

Photo credit: Bill Ingalls, NASA
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Compass rose

Replica of a compass rose from the chart of Jorge de Aguiar (1492), the oldest known signed and dated Portuguese nautical chart. It is a 32 point compass rose, meaning that the lines that irradiate from its centre indicate 32 different geographic directions. The original chart is in the Beinecke Library at Yale University.

Image credit: Joaquim Alves Gaspar
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Portland, Oregon

A view of Portland, Oregon from the east waterfront depicting the skyline of the downtown district. The Hawthorne Bridge is prominent on the left. Although Portland is Oregon's largest city, it is not the state capital; that designation falls to Salem.

Photo credit: Eric Baetscher
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The Rhodes Colossus

The Rhodes Colossus is an iconic editorial cartoon of the Scramble for Africa period, depicting British colonialist Cecil John Rhodes as a giant standing over the continent, after his announcement of plans to to extend an electrical telegraph line from Cape Town to Cairo. Rhodes is shown in a visual pun as the ancient Greek statue the Colossus of Rhodes, with his right foot in Cape Town and his left in Cairo, illustrating his broader "Cape to Cairo" concept (see Cape-Cairo railway) for British domination of Africa.

Illustration: Edward Linley Sambourne
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German occupation of Czechoslovakia

A crying Sudeten woman salutes Adolf Hitler as German forces sweep into Czechoslovakia, October 1938. Originally published in the Völkischer Beobachter, it supposedly showed the intense emotions of joy which swept the populace as Hitler drove through the streets of Cheb, 99% of whose inhabitants were ardently pro-Nazi Sudeten Germans at the time. In contrast, the when the photo was published in the U.S., it was captioned, "The tragedy of this Sudeten woman, unable to conceal her misery as she dutifully salutes the triumphant Hitler, is the tragedy of the silent millions who have been 'won over' to Hitlerism by the 'everlasting use' of ruthless force." It is unknown what the true circumstances surrounding the photo are.

Photo credit: Völkischer Beobachter
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Hadrosauroidea

Representative dinosaurs of the Hadrosauroidea superfamily. The family Hadrosauridae contains the dinosaurs commonly known as "duck-billed" dinosaurs. They were ubiquitous herbivores during the Cretaceous period, and prey to theropoda such as Tyrannosaurus. The individual drawings represent typical genera. All these groups were alive in the late Cretaceous, and are generally known only from a single fossil site. Animals are shown to scale.

Image credit: Debivort
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Milky Way

This infrared image shows hundreds of thousands of stars crowded into the swirling core of our spiral Milky Way galaxy. In visible-light pictures, this region cannot be seen at all because cosmic dust lying between Earth and the galactic center blocks our view.

Photo credit: Spitzer Space Telescope
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Military use of children

This Chinese child soldier, age 10, with heavy pack, is a member of an army division returning to China following the capture of Myitkyina airfield, Burma, under the allied command of US Major General Frank Merrill in May 1944. Chinese and allied troops had earlier crossed through the treacherous jungle of the Kumon Bum Mountains before attacking Japanese troops to the south. A number of international conventions have since come into effect that try to limit the participation of children in armed conflicts. However, according to Human Rights Watch, as many as 300,000 children remain direct participants in war in over twenty countries around the world today.

Photo credit: U.S. Army Signal Corps
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Azulejo

Panel of azulejo (Portuguese blue glazed tiles) by artist Jorge Colaço (1922) representing an episode of the Battle of Aljubarrota (1385) between the Portuguese and Castilian armies. The Ala dos Namorados ("Wing of the fiancés") depicted in this scene was the left wing of the Portuguese defense formation.

Photo credit: Joaquim Alves Gaspar
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Kiwifruit

The kiwifruit is the edible fruit of a cultivar group of the woody vine Actinidia deliciosa and hybrids between this and other species in the same genus. In North America, South America and Europe, most people refer to the fruit simply as "kiwi," which is in fact the name of an indigenous New Zealand bird. The fruit was named after the bird because of the similar appearance.

Photo credit: André Karwath
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Blackbird

A young fluffed up female Blackbird (Turdus merula). Unlike males, who are all black except for a yellow eye-ring and bill, females have brown plumage and a brown beak. Blackbirds are common in woods and gardens over all of Europe and much of Asia south of the Arctic Circle. Females are aggressive in the spring when competing with others for good nesting territory.

Photo credit: Daniel Schwen
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Telegraphy

The first ever telegraph message. The transmitted message reads, in Morse Code: "What hath God wrought". A handwritten notation on the top of the paper strip reads, "This sentence was written from Washington by me at the Baltimore Terminus at 8.h 45min. A.M. on Friday May 24.th 1844, being the first ever transmitted from Washington to Baltimore by Telegraph and was indited by my much loved friend Annie G. Ellsworth. Sam F. B. Morse. Superintendent of Elec. Mag. Telegraphs."

Message credit: Samuel F. B. Morse
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Human skeleton

An adult female human skeleton. The skeleton provides six main functions: (1) Provide shape and support of the body; (2) provide an attachment surface for muscles and tendons which together enable (3) movement of the body; (4) protection of many vital organs, such as the brain, spinal cord, and heart; (5) the generation of blood cells, which takes place in red bone marrow; and (6) storage of calcium and iron.

Image credit: Mariana Ruiz
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