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SMS Lothringen was the last of five pre-dreadnought battleships of the Braunschweig class built for the Imperial German Navy. Launched in May 1904, she was named for the then-German province of Lothringen. The ship was armed with a battery of four 28 cm (11 in) guns and had a top speed of 18 knots (33 km/h; 21 mph). She was to be replaced in July 1914 by dreadnought battleships but World War I prevented her retirement. The ship and the rest of II Squadron joined the dreadnoughts of the High Seas Fleet to support a raid on Scarborough, Hartlepool, and Whitby in December 1914. She primarily served as a guard ship in the German Bight; in poor condition by 1916, she was withdrawn from fleet service in February. She thereafter patrolled the Danish straits until replaced by the battleship Hannover in September 1917. After the war, she was converted into a depot ship for F-type minesweepers and placed in reserve in March 1920. (This article is part of a featured topic: Battleships of Germany.)

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On this day...

May 27: Memorial Day in the United States

Manchu Prince Dorgon

1644 – Manchu regent Dorgon (depicted) defeated rebel leader Li Zicheng of the Shun dynasty at the Battle of Shanhai Pass, allowing the Manchus to enter and conquer the capital city of Beijing.
1799 – War of the Second Coalition: Austrian forces defeated the French Army of the Danube, capturing the strategically important Swiss town of Winterthur.
1954 – The security clearance of American nuclear physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, head of Project Y, was revoked.
1967 – Australians voted overwhelmingly for the number of Indigenous Australians to be included in population counts for constitutional purposes and for the federal government to make laws for their benefit.

Diego Ramírez de Arellano (d. 1624)
Julia Ward Howe (b. 1819)
Cilla Black (b. 1943)
Gérard Jean-Juste (d. 2009)

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Wheat Fields is a series of dozens of paintings by Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh. The close association of peasants and the cycles of nature particularly interested Van Gogh, such as the sowing of seeds, harvest and sheaves of wheat in the fields. Van Gogh saw ploughing, sowing and harvesting as symbolic to man's efforts to overwhelm the cycles of nature. This oil-on-canvas Wheat Fields painting, also sometimes known as Wheat Field with Alpilles Foothills in the Background, was created in June 1888 and is now in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.

Painting credit: Vincent van Gogh