HISTORICAL SPLENDOUR

YEAR OF THE TIGER // St. Vincent

Jonathan Yeo (1970-) is a British self-taught artist and arguably one of the world's leading contemporary portraitists. His subjects mainly consist of performers, artists and politicians including Idris Elba; Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall; Kevin Spacey, the then British Prime Minister Tony Blair; Malala Yousafzai; and Cara Delevingne. In 2007, Yeo made a portrait of the then American President, George W. Bush, made of clippings of flesh tones and body parts from pornographic magazines. His exhibition "Porn in the USA" included similar portrait created from pornographic collage cutouts of Tiger Woods and Sarah Palin among others (+more)

Zenobia in Chains by Harriet Hosmer (c. 1859)

The Space Shuttle Challenger disaster (28 January 1986) when the NASA Space Shuttle orbiter Challenger (OV-099) (mission STS-51-L) broke apart 73 seconds into its flight, leading to the deaths of all seven crew members, which included five NASA astronauts and two Payload Specialists. The spacecraft disintegrated over the Atlantic Ocean, off the coast of Cape Canaveral, Florida, at 11:39 EST (16:39 UTC) after an O-ring seal in the shuttle's right solid rocket booster (SRB) failed at liftoff due to cold temperatures on the morning of the launch. The exact timing of the death of the crew is unknown; several crew members are believed to have survived the initial breakup of the spacecraft but the shuttle had no escape system, and the impact of the crew compartment with the ocean surface was too violent to survive. Approximately 17% of the Americans witnessed the disaster live because of the presence of Payload Specialist Christa McAuliffe, who would have been the first teacher in space. Following the disaster, NASA refrained from sending astronauts into space for more than two years as it redesigned a number of the shuttle’s features. Flights began again in September 1988 with the successful launching of Discovery (mission STS-26) (+more).

THIS DAY IN HISTORY ♦ On 22 August 1485, Henry Tudor and his Lancastrian forces defeat the last Yorkist King, Richard III, and his army at the Battle of Bosworth Field thus ending the Wars of the Roses and later assuming the thone as King Henry VII of England.

Neferneferuaten Nefertiti (ca. 1370 – ca. 1330 BC) was the Great Royal Wife of the Pharaoh Akhenaten (originally Amenhotep IV). Together, they introduced a whole new religion to Egypt in which they worshipped the sun god, Aten. She and Akhenaten had six daughters together: Meritaten, Meketaten, Ankhesenpaaten, Neferneferuaten Tasherti, Neferneferure and Setepenre; and their marriage is generally believed to be a genuinely romantic, happy one. This belief has been strengthened because she's often been depicted like a pharaoh would be – fighting and defeating enemies, thus making Nefertiti believed to have been a very influential and powerful queen. Nefertiti's name is Egyptian and means "the beautiful one has come", which is suiting considering that she is well-known for her elegant beauty. Some believe that Nefertiti ruled briefly as Neferneferuaten after her husband's death and before the accession of his son, Tutankhamun, but another possibility is that one of her daughters ruled Egypt for that time period (+more).

Rococo is an 18th century artistic movement and style. It developed in the early 18th century in Paris, France as a reaction against the grandeur, symmetry, and strict regulations of the Baroque, especially of the Palace of Versailles. Rococo artists used a more jocular, florid, and graceful approach to the Baroque. Their style was ornate and used light colours, asymmetrical designs, curves, and gold; and unlike the political Baroque, the Rococo had playful and witty themes.

Judith Slaying Holofernes (1614–1618) by Artemisia Gentileschi

Hanna Reitsch (1912–1979) was a German aviatrix and one of the most well-known Nazi test pilots. She was the only woman awarded the Luftwaffe Pilot/Observer Badge (1941) and the Iron Cross, First Class (1943) during World War II. Fascinated with flying from an early age, Reitsch reportedly attempted to jump off the balcony of her home at the age of 4 in eagerness to experience flight. At her death she had set over 40 aviation altitude and endurance records both before and after World War II and any of her records have yet to be beaten. In 1937, Reitsch was made a Luftwaffe civilian test pilot, a post she would hold until the end of World War II, and tested several bombers for which she received the Iron Cross, Second Class, from Adolf Hitler in 1941. Reitsch was the first female helicopter pilot and her flying skill, desire for publicity and photogenic qualities made her a star of Nazi Party propaganda in which she appeared throughout the late 1930s. In 1942, she crash landed on her fifth Messerschmitt Me 163 Komet flight and was badly injured and Reitsch received the Iron Cross, First Class, a few days after the accident. On 28 February 1944, she presented her idea of Operation Suicide to Hitler who, however, "did not consider the war situation sufficiently serious" to warrent it. In October 1944, Reitsch was shown a booklet concerning the gas chambers. While she claimed she believed it to be enemy propaganda, she agreed to inform Heinrich Himmler about it. Himmler asked her if she believed it and she replied, "No, of course not. But you must do something to counter it. You can't let them shoulder this onto Germany." During the last days of the war, Hitler dismissed Hermann Göring as head of the Luftwaffe and instead appointed Reitsch's lover, Generaloberst Robert Ritter von Greim, after they had flown into embattled Berlin to meet him in the Führerbunker. Red Army troops were already in Berlin when Reitsch and von Greim arrived on 26 April in a Fieseler Fi 156 Storch but with her long experience at low-altitude flying over Berlin and having already surveyed the road as an escape route, Reitsch landed on an improvised airstrip in the Tiergarten near the Brandenburg Gate. They left again on 28 April under heavy shooting from Soviet troops who feared that Hitler was escaping in the plane but the it took off successfully. Before leaving, Hitler gave Reitsch and Von Greim a cyanide phial each before dismissing them from the bunker. Reitsch was captured soon after the fall of the Third Reich and was held and interrogated for eighteen months. Her companion, von Greim, committed suicide on 24 May. After her release, Reitsch settled in Frankfurt am Main. Following the war, German citizens were barred from flying powered aircraft, but within a few years gliding was allowed, which she took up and in 1952, she won a bronze medal in the World Gliding Championships in Spain as the first woman to compete. From 1962 to 1966, she lived in Ghana, where she founded the first black African national gliding school and worked for Kwame Nkrumah. In 1970, she gained the Diamond Badge. While in Ghana, Reitsch's attitudes to race changed: "Earlier in my life, it would never have occurred to me to treat a black person as a friend or partner..." She now experienced guilt at her earlier "presumptuousness and arrogance". In her final interview in the 1970s, she, however, remarked that "many Germans feel guilty about the war. But they don’t explain the real guilt we share — that we lost." Reitsch died in Frankfurt at the age of 67, on 24 August 1979, reportedly after a heart attack. It is, however, known that she somehow had managed to retain her cyanide capsule and some believe that Reitsch, who had made a suicide pact with her lover von Greim, may have been fulfilling her end of the pact by taking the capsule. Unfortunately, no post mortem was ever made on her body to confirm this (+more).

Ballet by Edgar Degas

Nope, vesperlynds is :)