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From today's featured article

Zeng (right) with fellow imperial officials, 1872

Zeng Laishun (c. 1826 – 2 June 1895) was a Chinese interpreter and among the first Chinese students to study at a foreign college. Born in Singapore to a Malay mother and a Teochew father, he was orphaned at a young age, and educated at a Christian mission school. He was sent to the United States in 1843 and later attended Hamilton College for two years, before a lack of funding forced him to move to China. After a few years of mission work, he moved to Shanghai to become a businessman, and later an English teacher at an imperial naval school. In 1871, he was selected as a tutor and interpreter for the Chinese Educational Mission. Alongside Yung Wing, Chen Lanbin, his family, and the first cohort of students, he returned to the U.S. in 1872, staying in Springfield, Massachusetts. He went on speaking tours and was briefly dispatched to Cuba to investigate the abuses of the coolie trade. He was recalled to China in 1874, and took up work as a secretary for statesman Li Hongzhang. (Full article...)

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Did you know ...

National Windrush Monument

... that the National Windrush Monument (pictured) features a family standing on a pile of suitcases and "surveying their new country"?
... that a drawing of a dog was promoted by the president of El Salvador, caused an unaffiliated song to peak on the TikTok Billboard Top 50, and got its original creator doxxed?
... that the naturalised German Mandenga Diek was denied funds to return to his native Cameroon because he wanted to bring his German wife?
... that Chicago's tornado siren has been described as creepier than the city's actual tornadoes?
... that a snowstorm resulted in Mickey Volcan and Garry Howatt becoming the first active players to officiate a National Hockey League game?
... that Església de Sant Serni de Canillo has the tallest bell tower in Andorra?
... that the director of the lesbian film The First Girl I Loved based the plot on true stories gathered from all-girls school graduates he interviewed?
... that butcher Leo Franciosi was also a four-time Olympian?
... that a homily written by Pseudo-Evodius features Jesus and the devil competing in a fishing tournament in the desert?

In the news

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o

Kenyan writer and activist Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o (pictured) dies at the age of 87.
Flooding submerges the town of Mokwa, Nigeria, leaving more than 200 people dead.
In sumo, Ōnosato Daiki is promoted to yokozuna.
In association football, Liverpool win the Premier League title.
In the Surinamese general election, the National Democratic Party wins the most seats in the National Assembly.

On this day

June 2: Festa della Repubblica in Italy (1946); King's Official Birthday in New Zealand (2025); Western Australia Day (2025)

Luigi Galleani

1802 – Henry Hacking killed the Aboriginal Australian resistance fighter Pemulwuy after Philip Gidley King ordered that he be brought in dead or alive.
1919 – First Red Scare: The anarchist followers of Luigi Galleani (pictured) set off eight bombs in eight cities across the United States.
1953 – Queen Elizabeth II was crowned at Westminster Abbey in London.
1973 – Della Aleksander co-presented an episode of Open Door on transgender women's lives.
2023 – A collision between two passenger trains and a parked freight train near the city of Balasore, Odisha, in eastern India resulted in 296 deaths and more than 1,200 people injured.

Bernard of Wąbrzeźno (d. 1603)
William Salmon (b. 1644)
Gilbert Baker (b. 1951)
Radoje Pajović (d. 2019)

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From today's featured list

Burledge Hillfort

There are numerous Iron Age hillforts and ancient settlements in Somerset, a ceremonial county in South West England. Somerset is a rural county of rolling hills, such as the Mendip Hills, the Quantock Hills and Exmoor National Park, and large flat expanses of land including the Somerset Levels. Some locations were later reused in the Dark Ages, such as Cadbury Castle, Worlebury Camp and Ham Hill. Other hillforts, such as Small Down Knoll, Solsbury Hill, Dolebury Warren and Burledge Hill (pictured), may have had a domestic purpose as well as a defensive role. In addition to the hillforts, several sites have been identified as settlements during the pre-Roman period, including Cambria Farm and the "Lake Villages" at Meare and Glastonbury, which were built on a morass, on an artificial foundation of timber filled with brushwood, bracken, rubble and clay. (Full list...)

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Today's featured picture

The Battle of Diamond Rock was a naval battle that took place between 31 May and 2 June 1805 during the Trafalgar campaign of the War of the Third Coalition, part of the Napoleonic Wars. A Franco-Spanish force dispatched under Captain Julien Cosmao retook Diamond Rock, on the approach to Fort-de-France on the Caribbean island of Martinique, from the British forces that had occupied it more than a year before. This oil-on-canvas painting depicting the battle, titled Taking of the Rock Le Diamant, near Martinique, 2 June 1805, was painted in 1837 by Auguste Étienne François Mayer, and measures 80 cm (31.4 in) high and 128 cm (50.3 in) wide. The painting now hangs in the Palace of Versailles.

Painting credit: Auguste Étienne François Mayer

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