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This month's featured article
"Jack the Ripper" is the best-known name given to an unidentified serial killer who was active in the largely impoverished areas in and around the Whitechapel district of London in 1888. The name originated in a letter, written by someone claiming to be the murderer, that was disseminated in the media. The letter is widely believed to have been a hoax, and may have been written by a journalist in a deliberate attempt to heighten interest in the story. Other nicknames used for the killer at the time were "The Whitechapel Murderer" and "Leather Apron".
Attacks ascribed to the Ripper typically involved female prostitutes from the slums whose throats were cut prior to abdominal mutilations. The removal of internal organs from at least three of the victims led to proposals that their killer possessed anatomical or surgical knowledge. Rumours that the murders were connected intensified in September and October 1888, and letters from a writer or writers purporting to be the murderer were received by media outlets and Scotland Yard. The "From Hell" letter, received by George Lusk of the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee, included half of a preserved human kidney, supposedly from one of the victims. Mainly because of the extraordinarily brutal character of the murders, and because of media treatment of the events, the public came increasingly to believe in a single serial killer known as "Jack the Ripper".
Extensive newspaper coverage bestowed widespread and enduring international notoriety on the Ripper. An investigation into a series of brutal killings in Whitechapel up to 1891 was unable to connect all the killings conclusively to the murders of 1888, but the legend of Jack the Ripper solidified. As the murders were never solved, the legends surrounding them became a combination of genuine historical research, folklore, and pseudohistory. The term "ripperology" was coined to describe the study and analysis of the Ripper cases. There are now over one hundred theories about the Ripper's identity, and the murders have inspired multiple works of fiction.
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Did you know...
...that Horatia N. Thompson (pictured) was christened with Lord Nelson and Mrs Hamilton as godparents and was later adopted by them as an orphan, even though they were her biological parents?
...that the 1609 Treaty of Antwerp was influenced by the writings of Hugo Grotius in the Mare Liberum, which was published at the insistence of the Dutch East India Company during the course of the treaty negotiations?
...that Grand Duke Nicholas Mikhailovich of Russia let a soldier tasked with his execution take care of a cat?
...that, after driving the French Republicans from Italy, Russian Field-Marshal Alexander Suvorov managed to conduct a masterful flight across the snow-capped Alps?
...that George Rogers Clark was called the "Conqueror of the Northwest" because of his victorious Illinois campaign in the American Revolutionary War?
...that the crown-cardinals of Austria, France, and Spain could exercise the jus exclusivae during papal conclaves from the 16th to 20th centuries?
...that some accounts regarding the fighting during the Battle of Bonchurch states that some of the female population of the Isle of Wight participated by firing arrows at the French troops?
...that the Mongol Empire, also known as the Mongolian Empire was the largest contiguous empire in world history and for some time was the most feared in Eurasia?
...that the pioneers traveled to the Salt Lake Valley in the Great Basin using wagons, handcarts, and, in some cases, personally carrying their belongings. Their trail along the Platte River and over the Sweetwater River became known as the Mormon Trail?
...that when Mawewe, the putative king of Gazaland (in 19th-century Mozambique), played rough with the colonial Portuguese by demanding tribute and threatening to exterminate the Europeans if they refused to pay, Paiva de Andrade, then governor of Lourenço Marques, responded by sending a single rifle cartridge to Mawewe, saying that this would be the form his tribute would take?
...that the Muslim conquests (632–732), (Arabic: فتح, Fataḥ, literally opening,) also referred to as the Islamic conquests or Arab conquests, began after the death of the Islamic prophet Muhammad. He established a new unified political policy in the Arabian Peninsula which under the subsequent Rashidun (The Rightly Guided Caliphs) and Umayyad Caliphates saw a century of rapid expansion of Muslim power?
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