[Wikipedia] Hannah Primrose, Countess of Rosebery

[Faraaz Damji]

   Hannah Primrose, Countess of Rosebery was the daughter of Baron Mayer
   de Rothschild and his wife Juliana, née Cohen.  On the death of her
   father in 1874 she became the richest woman in Britain.  Her husband,
   the 5th Earl of Rosebery, was, during the final quarter of the
   nineteenth century, one of the most celebrated figures in Britain, an
   influential millionaire and politician, whose charm, wit, charisma and
   public popularity gave him such standing that he "almost eclipsed
   royalty".  Her marriage into the aristocracy, while controversial at
   the time, gave her the social cachet in an anti-Semitic society that
   her vast fortune could not.  She subsequently became a political
   hostess and philanthropist.  Her charitable work was principally in the
   sphere of public health and causes associated with the welfare of
   working class Jewish women living in the poorer districts of London.
   Having firmly assisted and supported her husband on his path to
   political greatness, she suddenly died in 1890, aged 39, leaving him
   to achieve, bewildered and without her support, the political destiny
   which she had plotted alone.  His premiership of the United Kingdom was
   shambolic, and lasted barely a year.

Read the rest of this article:
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannah_Primrose%2C_Countess_of_Rosebery


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Today's selected anniversaries:

1580:
   The Golden Hind sailed into Plymouth, England, as Francis Drake
   completed his circumnavigation of the globe.
   (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Drake)

1687:
   The Parthenon in Athens was partially destroyed during an armed
   conflict between the Venetians under Francesco Morosini and Ottoman
   forces.
   (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parthenon)

1907:
   Newfoundland and New Zealand became dominions within the British
   Empire.
   (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newfoundland_and_Labrador)

1957:
   West Side Story, a musical based loosely on Shakespeare's Romeo and
   Juliet that was written by Arthur Laurents, Leonard Bernstein and
   Stephen Sondheim, and produced and directed by Jerome Robbins, made
   its debut on Broadway.
   (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Side_Story)

1983:
   Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov of the Soviet Union averted a
   possible worldwide nuclear war by deliberately certifying what
   otherwise appeared to be an impending attack by the United States as a
   false alarm.
   (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov)


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Wiktionary's Word of the day:

   zeugma: The act of using a word, particularly an adjective or verb, to
   apply to more than one noun when its sense is appropriate to only one
   or in different ways.
   (http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/zeugma)


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Wikiquote of the day:

   Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind Cannot bear very much reality.
   Time past and time future What might have been and what has been Point
   to one end, which is always present.  -- T.  S.  Eliot in The Four
   Quartets --
   (http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/T._S._Eliot)