Today's featured article
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 Uncle Tupelo was an alternative country music group from Belleville, Illinois, active between 1987 and 1994. Jay Farrar (pictured), Jeff Tweedy, and Mike Heidorn formed the band after the lead singer of their previous band, The Primitives, left to attend college. The trio recorded three albums for Rockville Records, before signing with Sire Records and expanding to a five-piece. Shortly after the release of the band's major label debut album Anodyne, Farrar announced his decision to leave the band due to a soured relationship with his co-songwriter Tweedy. Uncle Tupelo split on May 1, 1994, after completing a farewell tour. Following the breakup, Farrar formed Son Volt with Heidorn, while the remaining members continued as Wilco. Although Uncle Tupelo broke up before they achieved commercial success, the band is renowned for its impact on the alternative country music scene. The group's first album, No Depression, became a byword for the genre and was widely influential. Uncle Tupelo's sound was unlike popular country music of the time, drawing inspiration from styles as diverse as the hardcore punk of The Minutemen and the country instrumentation and harmony of the Carter Family and Hank Williams. Farrar and Tweedy lyrics frequently referred to Middle America and the working class of Belleville. (more...)
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July 16
- 1782 – Mozart's opera Die Entführung aus dem Serail made its premiere, after which Emperor Joseph II anecdotally made the comment that it had "too many notes".
- 1790 – U.S. President George Washington signed the Residence Act, selecting a new permanent site along the Potomac River for the capital of the United States, which later became Washington, D.C.
- 1945 – Manhattan Project: "Trinity", the first nuclear test explosion, was carried out near Alamogordo, New Mexico.
- 1951 – The Catcher in the Rye, an American coming-of-age novel by J. D. Salinger, was first published.
- 1994 – Fragments of Comet Shoemaker–Levy 9 began hitting the planet Jupiter (impact site pictured), with the first one causing a fireball which reached a peak temperature of about 24,000 K.
- 2007 – A magnitude 6.6 MW earthquake struck Niigata Prefecture, Japan, causing a leak of radioactive gases from the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa Nuclear Power Plant.
More anniversaries: July 15 – July 16 – July 17
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Today's featured list
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 The bibliography of George Orwell includes journalism, essays, books, and fiction written by the British writer Eric Arthur Blair (pictured), pen name George Orwell. Orwell first achieved widespread acclaim with his fictional novella Animal Farm and cemented his place in history as a novelist with the publication of Nineteen Eighty-Four shortly before his death. While fiction accounts for a small fraction of his total output, these two novels are his best-selling works, having sold almost fifty million copies in sixty-two languages by 2007—more than any other pair of books by a twentieth-century author. In addition, Orwell wrote book-length investigations of poverty in Britain in the form of Down and Out in Paris and London and The Road to Wigan Pier and one of the first retrospectives on the Spanish Civil War in Homage to Catalonia. The impact of Orwell's large corpus is manifested in additions to the Western canon and the adoption of "Orwellian" as a description of totalitarian societies. (more...)
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