Wikipedia:Main Page history/2020 February 2

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The San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge half dollar is a fifty-cent piece struck by the United States Bureau of the Mint in 1936 as a commemorative coin. One of many commemoratives issued that year, it was designed by Jacques Schnier and honors the opening of the Bay Bridge that November. One side of the coin depicts a grizzly bear, a symbol of California, and the other shows the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge, with the Ferry Building. Congress passed authorizing legislation for the coin in 1936. Schnier's models were approved and the coins were struck at the San Francisco Mint. Just over 70,000 coins were sold, by mail, in person, and from booths at the Bay Bridge's approaches, making it the first commemorative coin to be sold on a drive-in basis. The coins were taken off sale in February 1937, with the unsold remainder returned to the Mint for redemption and melting. The Bay Bridge half dollar catalogs in the low hundreds of dollars, depending on condition. (Full article...)

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In the news

Map showing the UK (in orange)
and the EU (in blue)

The United Kingdom leaves the European Union and begins an eleven-month transition period.
The World Health Organization declares the outbreak of respiratory disease from a novel coronavirus to be a Public Health Emergency of International Concern.
Floods and landslides in southeastern Brazil kill at least sixty people and leave thousands of others homeless.

On this day

February 2: Groundhog Day in Canada and the United States

Seal of the U.S. Export–Import Bank

1207 – Terra Mariana, comprising present-day Estonia and Latvia, was established as a principality of the Holy Roman Empire.
1438 – Nine leaders of the Transylvanian peasant revolt were executed at Torda.
1920 – The signing of the Treaty of Tartu ended the Estonian War of Independence, with Russia agreeing to recognize the independence of Estonia and renounce in perpetuity all rights to its territory.
1934 – The Export–Import Bank of the United States (seal pictured), the country's official export credit agency, was established.
2007 – Following a Derby di Sicilia match in Catania, football violence caused the death of police officer Filippo Raciti, leading to new safety regulations at Italian sporting events.

Alix Le Clerc (b. 1576) · William Stanley (b. 1829) · Philip Seymour Hoffman (d. 2014)

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Today's featured picture

Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord (2 February 1754 – 17 May 1838) was a French politician and diplomat. His career spanned the regimes of Louis XVI, Napoleon, Louis XVIII and Louis-Philippe, as well as the French Revolutionary era preceding Napoleon. Those whom he served often distrusted him but found him extremely useful, and the name "Talleyrand" has become a byword for crafty, cynical diplomacy.

This portrait in oils was painted by Pierre-Paul Prud'hon in 1817, during the reign of Louis XVIII; Prud'hon had previously painted a portrait of each of Napoleon's two wives. The picture is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Painting credit: Pierre-Paul Prud'hon

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