Margaret Murray (13 July 1863 – 13 November 1963) was an Anglo-Indian
Egyptologist, archaeologist, historian, and folklorist. The first female
archaeology lecturer in the United Kingdom, she worked at University
College London (UCL) and served as President of the Folklore Society.
Born in Calcutta, Murray moved to London and began studying Egyptology
at UCL. The department head Flinders Petrie encouraged her research and
soon appointed her Junior Professor. She established a reputation in
Egyptology for her excavations of the Osireion temple and Saqqara
cemetery. She taught at the British Museum and also the Manchester
Museum, where she led the unwrapping of one of the mummies from the Tomb
of the Two Brothers. A first-wave feminist, Murray joined the Women's
Social and Political Union. During the First World War, she began
promoting the hypothesis that the witch trials of Early Modern
Christendom were an attempt to extinguish a surviving pre-Christian
religion devoted to a Horned God. Although later academically
discredited, the theory gained widespread attention and provided the
basis for Wicca.
Read more: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Murray>
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Today's selected anniversaries:
1830:
Scottish Church College, the oldest continuously running
Christian liberal arts and sciences college in India, was founded as the
General Assembly's Institution.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scottish_Church_College>
1863:
Three days of rioting began in New York City by opponents of
new laws passed by the United States Congress to draft men to fight in
the ongoing American Civil War.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_draft_riots>
1941:
The Communist Party of Yugoslavia initiated a general and
popular uprising against Italian occupation forces in Montenegro that
was suppressed within six weeks.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uprising_in_Montenegro>
1962:
In an unprecedented action, British Prime Minister Harold
Macmillan dismissed seven members of his Cabinet.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_of_the_Long_Knives_(1962)>
2008:
War in Afghanistan: Taliban guerrillas attacked NATO troops
near the village of Wanat in the Waygal district in Afghanistan's far
eastern province of Nuristan.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Wanat>
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Wiktionary's word of the day:
pentaquark:
(physics) Any of a class of subatomic particles (previously
hypothetical, since detected, subject to confirmation) consisting of a
group of five quarks (compared to three quarks in normal baryons and two
in mesons), or more specifically four quarks and one antiquark (symbol
Θ).
<https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pentaquark>
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Wikiquote quote of the day:
There is (gentle reader) nothing (the works of God only set apart)
which so much beautifies and adorns the soul and mind of man as does
knowledge of the good arts and sciences. Many arts there are which
beautify the mind of man; but of all none do more garnish and beautify
it than those arts which are called mathematical, unto the knowledge of
which no man can attain, without perfect knowledge and instruction of
the principles, grounds, and Elements of Geometry.
--John Dee
<https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Dee>