Wikipedia:Main Page history/2022 January 8

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The Missouri Centennial half dollar is a commemorative fifty-cent piece struck by the United States Bureau of the Mint in 1921. It was designed by Robert Ingersoll Aitken. The U.S. state of Missouri wanted a commemorative coin to mark its centennial that year. Authorizing legislation passed through Congress without opposition, and was signed on March 4, 1921, by President Warren G. Harding on his inauguration day. The federal Commission of Fine Arts hired Aitken to design the coin, which depicted Daniel Boone on both sides. The reverse design, showing Boone with a Native American, was likely intended to symbolize the displacement of the Indians by white settlers. To increase sales, a portion of the issue was produced with the mark "2★4", symbolic of Missouri being the 24th state. Although admired for the design, the coins did not sell as well as hoped, and almost 60 percent were returned to the Philadelphia Mint for melting. (Full article...)

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In the news

Sidney Poitier

Bahamian-American actor Sidney Poitier (pictured) dies at the age of 94.
Kazakhstan's government resigns amid protests against a sharp increase in fuel prices.
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On this day

January 8

Sheikh Mujibur Rahman

1198 – Lotario de Conti was elected as Pope Innocent III; he later worked to restore papal power in Rome.
1889 – American statistician Herman Hollerith received a patent for his electromechanical tabulating machine for punched-card data.
1936 – Reza Shah issued the Kashf-e hijab decree in Iran, ordering police to physically remove hijabs from any women in public.
1972 – Following Pakistan's defeat in the Bangladesh Liberation War, President Zulfikar Ali Bhutto released Bangladeshi politician Sheikh Mujibur Rahman (pictured) from prison in response to international pressure.
1991 – Jeremy Wade Delle committed suicide in his high-school class in Richardson, Texas, inspiring the Pearl Jam song "Jeremy".

Nicholas Biddle (b. 1786)
Mór Kóczán (b. 1885)
T. J. Hamblin (d. 2012)

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Today's featured picture

The polychrome wooden vault and bimah of the Gwoździec Synagogue, painstakingly reconstructed in 2014, is the centerpiece of the permanent exhibition at the Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw, Poland. The original synagogue, built in ca. 1640 in what is now the Ukrainian town of Hvizdets, was burnt down in 1941 by Nazi German forces.

Photograph credit: Magdalena Starowieyska, Dariusz Golik

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