Category: 2018

The Wikipedia article of the day for February 7, 2018 is Guadalcanal Campaign.
In the Guadalcanal Campaign of the Second World War, the Allies reversed the gains of Imperial Japan in the southwest Pacific. U.S. forces had inflicted heavy losses on the Imperial Japanese Navy at the Battle of Midway in June 1942, but Japan had remained on the offensive, pushing into the Solomon Islands from Rabaul and threatening supply lines to Australia and New Zealand. In August 1942, U.S. Marines landed on Guadalcanal in the southern Solomon Islands. The Japanese had occupied the islands since May, and were building an airfield (later named Henderson Field). The Allies overwhelmed the surprised Japanese defenders and captured the airfield. The Japanese attempted to retake it but were defeated in the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal in early November. They abandoned their campaign in December, and evacuated their remaining forces on 7 February 1943. The Allied victories on Guadalcanal, and in New Guinea, marked the transition from defensive operations to a series of offensives that culminated in the Japanese surrender in 1945.

Source http://handbookblogger.blogspot.com/2018/02/wikipedia-article-of-day-for-february-7.html

The Wikipedia article of the day for February 6, 2018 is Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna of Russia.
Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna of Russia (1882–1960) was the youngest child of Emperor Alexander III of Russia and younger sister of Emperor Nicholas II. Her father died when she was 12, and her brother Nicholas became emperor. At 19 she married Duke Peter Alexandrovich of Oldenburg; their marriage was unconsummated and was annulled by the Emperor in October 1916. The following month Olga married cavalry officer Nikolai Kulikovsky, with whom she had fallen in love several years before. During the First World War, the Grand Duchess served as an army nurse at the front and was awarded a medal for personal gallantry. At the downfall of the Romanovs in the Russian Revolution of 1917, she fled to the Crimea with her husband and children, where they lived under the threat of assassination. After her brother and his family were shot by revolutionaries, she and her family escaped to Denmark in February 1920. In exile, she was often sought out by Romanov impostors who claimed to be her dead relatives. In 1948, feeling threatened by Joseph Stalin’s regime, she emigrated with her immediate family to Ontario, Canada.

Source http://handbookblogger.blogspot.com/2018/02/wikipedia-article-of-day-for-february-6.html

The Wikipedia article of the day for February 5, 2018 is White-breasted nuthatch.
The white-breasted nuthatch (Sitta carolinensis) is a small songbird that breeds in old-growth woodland across much of temperate North America. It is a stocky nuthatch with a large head, short tail, powerful bill, and strong feet. The upperparts are pale blue-gray, and the face and underparts are white. It has a black cap and a chestnut lower belly. The nine subspecies differ mainly in the color of the body plumage. Like other nuthatches, the white-breasted nuthatch forages for insects on trunks and branches and is able to move head-first down trees. Seeds form a substantial part of its winter diet, as do acorns and hickory nuts that were stored by the bird in the fall. The nest is in a hole in a tree, and a breeding pair may smear insects around the entrance as a deterrent to squirrels. Adults and their young may be killed by hawks, owls, and snakes, and forest clearance may lead to local habitat loss, but this is a common species with no major conservation concerns over most of its range.

Source http://handbookblogger.blogspot.com/2018/02/wikipedia-article-of-day-for-february-5.html

The Wikipedia article of the day for February 4, 2018 is 1998 NFC Championship Game.
The 1998 NFC Championship Game was a National Football League game played on January 17, 1999, to determine the National Football Conference (NFC) champion for the 1998 NFL season. The visiting Atlanta Falcons defeated the heavily favored Minnesota Vikings 30–27 in sudden death overtime to win their first conference championship and advance to the franchise’s first Super Bowl appearance. The Vikings had gone undefeated in their home stadium, the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome, during the regular season, and their placekicker, Gary Anderson, had become the first kicker in NFL history to convert every field goal and extra point attempt in a season. At a critical moment late in the game, Anderson missed a field goal that would have given the Vikings a nearly insurmountable 10-point lead. Instead, the Falcons scored a touchdown to tie the game on their ensuing drive, and in overtime they won by a field goal. The Vikings became the first team with an NFL regular season record of 15–1 that did not go on to win the Super Bowl.

Source http://handbookblogger.blogspot.com/2018/02/wikipedia-article-of-day-for-february-4.html

The Wikipedia article of the day for February 3, 2018 is Plunketts Creek (Loyalsock Creek tributary).
Plunketts Creek is a 6.2-mile-long (10.0 km) tributary of Loyalsock Creek in Lycoming and Sullivan counties in the U.S. state of Pennsylvania. Its watershed drains 23.6 square miles (61 km2) in the Chesapeake Bay basin by way of the West Branch Susquehanna and Susquehanna rivers. The creek is named for Colonel William Plunkett, who led a Pennsylvania expedition in the Pennamite–Yankee War to forcibly remove settlers arriving from Connecticut, who were claiming lands that were also claimed by Pennsylvania. For his services, Plunkett was granted land that included the creek’s mouth. The creek flows southwest and then south through the dissected Allegheny Plateau, through rock from the Mississippian sub-period and Devonian period. Much of the Plunketts Creek valley is composed of glacial deposits, chiefly alluvium. A potentially large source of natural gas, the Marcellus Shale, lies 1.5 to 2.0 miles (2.4 to 3.2 km) below the surface. Although the watershed was clear-cut and home to a tannery, sawmills, and a coal mine in the nineteenth century, today it is heavily wooded with abundant potable water.

Source http://handbookblogger.blogspot.com/2018/02/wikipedia-article-of-day-for-february-3.html

The Wikipedia article of the day for February 2, 2018 is Mit Fried und Freud ich fahr dahin, BWV 125.
Mit Fried und Freud ich fahr dahin (With peace and joy I depart), BWV 125, is a church cantata by Johann Sebastian Bach, composed in Leipzig in 1725 for the Candlemas feast on 2 February. The cantata is based on Martin Luther’s 1524 hymn of the same name. The gospel for the feast day, the presentation of Jesus at the Temple, includes Simeon’s canticle (painting pictured), which Luther paraphrased in his hymn. For Bach’s chorale cantata cycle, an unknown librettist retained the first and the last of Luther’s four stanzas, paraphrasing the second stanza for an aria, and including its original text line by line in a recitative. Bach framed four solo movements with choral music, a chorale fantasia and a closing chorale. He scored the work for three vocal soloists, a four-part choir, horn, flauto traverso, oboes, strings and basso continuo. In the third movement, Bach uses recitative for the librettist’s text, and arioso for the interspersed hymn quotations, accompanying both with a joyful motif. The opening chorus has been compared to the opening movement of Bach’s later St Matthew Passion.

Source http://handbookblogger.blogspot.com/2018/02/wikipedia-article-of-day-for-february-2.html