Wikipedia:Main Page history/2016 April 14

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15th-century depiction

The Battle of Barnet (14 April 1471) during the Wars of the Roses, followed by the Battle of Tewkesbury, secured the throne for Edward IV of England and launched fourteen years of Yorkist rule. Near Barnet, then a small Hertfordshire town north of London, Edward led the House of York against Richard Neville, 16th Earl of Warwick, and the House of Lancaster, which backed Henry VI for the throne. The battle began in a thick fog at dawn. While the main forces struggled, John de Vere, 13th Earl of Oxford, and his Lancastrian troops routed the Yorkists under Lord William Hastings, chasing them up to Barnet. On their return to the battlefield, Oxford's men were erroneously shot at by his allies commanded by John Neville, 1st Marquess of Montagu. The Lancastrians lost the battle as cries of treason spread through their line and many abandoned the fight. While retreating, Warwick was killed. Historians regard the battle as one of the most important clashes in the Wars of the Roses, bringing about a decisive turn in the fortunes of the two houses. (Full article...)

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Head of the Croatian Apoxyomenos

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In the news

Danny Willett

The Minjoo Party of Korea wins a plurality of seats in the South Korean National Assembly.
In golf, Danny Willett (pictured) wins the Masters Tournament.
More than 100 people are killed in a fireworks accident at a Hindu temple in Kollam, Kerala, India.
In horse racing, Rule the World wins the Grand National.
SpaceX CRS-8, an unmanned cargo mission to the International Space Station, performs the first successful landing of its reusable main-stage booster on an autonomous spaceport drone ship.

Ongoing events
Recent deaths:
- Howard Marks

On this day...

April 14: Bengali New Year; Cambodian New Year, Tamil New Year, and other New Year festivals in Asia (2016); Day of the Georgian language in Georgia (1978)

Noah Webster

966 – After his marriage to the Christian Dobrawa of Bohemia, the pagan ruler of the Polans, Mieszko I, converted to Christianity, an event considered to be the founding of the Polish state.
1828 – Lexicographer Noah Webster (pictured) copyrighted the first edition of his dictionary of American English.
1909 – Following a military revolt against the constitutional government, a mob began a massacre of Armenians in Adana Vilayet, Ottoman Empire.
1978 – Thousands of Georgians demonstrated in Tbilisi against an attempt by the Supreme Soviet of the Georgian SSR to change the constitutional status of the Georgian language.
2003 – The completion of the Human Genome Project was announced.

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The Peirce quincuncial projection is a conformal map projection developed by Charles Sanders Peirce in 1879, while he was working at the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey. In the normal aspect Peirce's projection presents the Northern Hemisphere in a square; the Southern Hemisphere is split into four 90°–45°–45° triangles surrounding it so that the whole map forms a larger square.

Map: Strebe, using Geocart

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