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.
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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)
_____________________ 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)
_____________________ 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)