Hope is an 1886 Symbolist oil painting by the English artist George
Frederic Watts. Radically different from previous treatments of the
subject, it shows a lone blindfolded female figure sitting on a globe,
playing a lyre which has only a single string remaining. Watts
intentionally used symbolism not traditionally associated with hope to
make the painting's meaning ambiguous. As reproductions began to
circulate in large quantities worldwide, it became a widely popular
image. Theodore Roosevelt displayed a copy at his Sagamore Hill home in
New York, and a 1922 film was based on the painting. Although Watts was
rapidly falling out of fashion by this time and Hope was increasingly
seen as outdated and sentimental, it remained influential. Martin Luther
King Jr. based a 1959 sermon on the theme of the painting, as did
Jeremiah Wright in 1990. Among the congregation for the latter was the
young Barack Obama, who took "The Audacity of Hope" as the theme of his
2004 Democratic National Convention keynote address, and as the title of
his 2006 book; he based his successful 2008 presidential campaign around
the theme of "Hope".
Read more: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hope_(painting)>
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Today's selected anniversaries:
1607:
San Agustin Church in Manila, the oldest extant church in the
Philippines, was completed.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Agustin_Church_(Manila)>
1862:
American Civil War: In their first significant victory, Union
forces defeated the Confederates at the Battle of Mill Springs near
modern Nancy, Kentucky.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Mill_Springs>
1945:
World War II: Soviet forces liberated the Łódź Ghetto; only
877 Jews of the initial population of 164,000 remained at that time.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%81%C3%B3d%C5%BA_Ghetto>
1972:
The French newspaper l'Aurore revealed that the Nazi SS officer
Klaus Barbie, the "Butcher of Lyon", had been found to be living in
Peru.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klaus_Barbie>
2007:
Turkish-Armenian journalist and human rights activist Hrant
Dink was assassinated by a Turkish nationalist.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Hrant_Dink>
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Wiktionary's word of the day:
unpaid:
1. Not paid (for).
2. Of work: done without agreed payment, usually voluntarily.
<https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/unpaid>
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Wikiquote quote of the day:
If justice be a natural principle, then it is necessarily an
immutable one; and can no more be changed — by any power inferior to
that which established it — than can the law of gravitation, the laws
of light, the principles of mathematics, or any other natural law or
principle whatever; and all attempts or assumptions, on the part of any
man or body of men — whether calling themselves governments, or by any
other name — to set up their own commands, wills, pleasure, or
discretion, in the place of justice, as a rule of conduct for any human
being, are as much an absurdity, an usurpation, and a tyranny, as would
be their attempts to set up their own commands, wills, pleasure, or
discretion in the place of any and all the physical, mental, and moral
laws of the universe. If there be any such principle as justice, it is,
of necessity, a natural principle; and, as such, it is a matter of
science, to be learned and applied like any other science. And to talk
of either adding to, or taking from, it, by legislation, is just as
false, absurd, and ridiculous as it would be to talk of adding to, or
taking from, mathematics, chemistry, or any other science, by
legislation.
--Lysander Spooner
<https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Lysander_Spooner>