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Henry Joseph Darger Jr. (/ˈdɑːrɡər/ DAR-ghər; April 12, 1892 – April 13, 1973) was an American janitor and hospital worker who became known after his death for his immense body of visual art and literature.

Darger was raised by his disabled father in Chicago. Frequently in fights, he was put into a charity home as his father's health declined, and in 1904 was sent to a children's asylum in Lincoln, Illinois, officially due to his masturbation. He began making escape attempts after his father's death in 1908, and in 1910 was able to escape, walking much of the way to Chicago. As an adult he did menial jobs for several hospitals, interrupted by a brief stint in the U.S. Army during World War I. He spent much of his life in poverty and in later life was a recluse in his apartment. A devout Catholic, Darger attended Mass multiple times each day and collected religious memorabilia. Retiring in 1963 due to chronic pain, he was moved into a charity nursing home in late 1972, shortly before his death. During this move, his landlords Kiyoko and Nathan Lerner discovered his artwork and writings, which he had kept secret over decades of work.

From around the early 1910s to the late 1930s, Darger wrote the 15,145-page novel In the Realms of the Unreal, centered on a rebellion of child slaves on a fantastical planet. The chief protagonists are the Vivian Girls, who fight to free the children from the enslaving Glandelinians. Inspired by the American Civil War and martyrdom stories, it features lengthy, gruesome descriptions of battles, many ending with the mass killing of rebel children. Between 1912 and 1925, Darger produced collages, often only loosely correlated to the book. Later he made these with watercolors and traced figures taken from popular sources such as magazines and children's books. These paintings grew more elaborate over time, with some of his largest works exceeding 10 feet (3 m) in length. Little girls, often in combat, are a primary focus; for unknown reasons, they are frequently depicted naked and exclusively with male genitalia. Other writings by Darger include a roughly 8,000-page unfinished sequel to In the Realms of the Unreal entitled Further Adventures of the Vivian Girls in Chicago, a decade-long daily weather journal, and The History of My Life—consisting of a 206-page autobiography followed by several thousand pages about the destruction caused by a fictional Illinois tornado.

Darger made no efforts to publish his work, and it was unknown to others until shortly before his death. He is frequently associated with the outsider art movement, which encompasses the work of self-taught creators outside the mainstream art community who frequently produce very singular and unusual work. His art was popularized by his former landlords and is now featured in many museum collections, with the largest at the American Folk Art Museum in New York City and the Intuit Art Museum in Chicago. Initial critical analysis of him and his work took a psychoanalytical approach, often focused on his many depictions of nude and brutalized children. Scholars have hypothesized several different psychological conditions Darger may have suffered from. Theories from earlier scholars that he was a pedophile or murderer have been discredited.

[Creeperopolis]

Beginning in 1914, silver coinage featuring a portrait of the Chinese president and military leader Yuan Shikai was minted across the Republic of China to replace the previous imperial coinage and various foreign silver coins in circulation in China. The most prominent and numerous of these coins, the Yuan Shikai dollar (also known as the "fatman dollar" by collectors, from Chinese 袁大头; yuán dàtóu; 'big head Yuan Shikai [dollars]'), remained in production long after Yuan's death in 1916. Designed by Tianjin Mint engraver Luigi Giorgi, the coin features a profile bust of Yuan wearing a military uniform on the obverse, with a wreath of grain and the denomination of one yuan on the reverse.

The dollar coins were regularly produced by various mints across China from 1914 to 1928, with a total production run exceeding a billion coins. Until 1920, all coins were dated Republican Year 3 (1914 CE) regardless of their actual year of production. Some mints produced coins featuring various three new dates during the 1920s, but these only incidentally coincided with their production date, with certain dates being usable as mint marks.

After the 1926–1928 Northern Expedition, the incipient Nationalist government halted production of the coins in favor of the memento dollar. However, regional circulation and production of the coins continued, with poorer-quality examples produced in Gansu and Communist-held areas during the 1930s. Production was curtailed by the abandonment of the silver standard in 1935, but returned in response to hyperinflation during the Chinese Civil War, including a large run of coins at Canton in 1949. The People's Republic once again produced the coin in the mid-1950s for circulation in newly annexed Tibet and rural regions of southwestern China. In total, around 1.1 billion Yuan Shikai dollars were produced from 1914 and 1954, not including local issues produced by warlords or revolutionaries.