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Free and Candid Disquisitions is an anonymously published 1749 pamphlet written and compiled by John Jones, a Welsh clergyman of the Church of England. The work promoted a series of reforms to the church and the Book of Common Prayer that Jones hoped would allow the more Protestant and independent Dissenters to be reintegrated into the church. Jones's proposals included shortening the Sunday liturgies, removing Catholic ritual influences, and providing improved hymns and psalms. Several responding texts were written, both lauding and criticizing Jones's work. While the proposals were not accepted by the Church of England, Jones's suggested alterations to the prayer book and advocacy of privately published liturgies influenced several Dissenter liturgical texts and early editions of the American Episcopal Church's prayer book. The pamphlet remained a major influence on proposed liturgical changes in the Church of England until the 19th-century Tractarian movement. (Full article...)

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On this day

August 3

Jesse Owens in the long jump at the 1936 Olympics

1347 – Hundred Years' War: The French town of Calais capitulated to English forces after an eleven-month seige, ending the Crécy campaign.
1903 – Macedonian rebels in Kruševo proclaimed a republic, which existed for ten days before Ottoman forces destroyed the town.
1936 – African-American athlete Jesse Owens won the first of his four gold medals at the Berlin Olympics, dashing Nazi leaders' hopes of Aryan domination at the games.
1971 – Fighting Dinosaurs, a fossil specimen featuring a Velociraptor and a Protoceratops in combat, was unearthed in the Djadochta Formation of Mongolia.
1997 – The Sky Tower, then the tallest free-standing structure in the Southern Hemisphere at 328 m (1,076 ft), opened in Auckland, New Zealand.

Herbert Armitage James (b. 1844)
Tony Bennett (b. 1926)
Frumka Płotnicka (d. 1943)
Alexander Mair (d. 1969)

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Belva Ann Lockwood (1830–1917) was an American lawyer, politician, educator, and author who was active in the women's rights and women's suffrage movements. She was one of the first women lawyers in the United States, and in 1879 she became the first woman to be admitted to practice law before the U.S. Supreme Court. She later ran for president, one of the first women to do so, in the 1884 and 1888 presidential elections, on the ticket of the National Equal Rights Party. This albumen silver print of a photograph of Lockwood was taken around 1880 by Benjamin Joseph Falk.

Photograph credit: Benjamin Joseph Falk; restored by Adam Cuerden

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