January 19 · This Day in America
A son is born to two traveling actors in Boston. His father will vanish; his mother will be dead of tuberculosis before he turns three. Edgar Allan Poe grows up orphaned, brilliant, and broke, and out of that haunted life he builds something American literature did not have yet. He more or less invents the detective story. He pushes the short story into a precise, engineered art. He writes horror that still works, and a poem — "The Raven" — that makes him briefly famous and almost no money. He dies at forty under circumstances no one has ever fully explained, delirious on a Baltimore street. But the genres he conceived became the bones of American popular storytelling: every mystery, every thriller, every tale told to scare you in the dark owes him a debt. The orphan from Boston taught a young country how to be afraid, and how to wonder, on the page.
Source: www.britannica.com
Also on this day · 1955
President Eisenhower walks into the Indian Treaty Room, glances at the cameras, and calls it an experiment. "I hope that doesn't prove to be a disturbing influence," he says, then takes questions. It is the first presidential news conference ever filmed for the public. The footage is still edited before release — live, unfiltered TV is six years off — but a wall has come down. From now on, Americans can watch their president answer for himself.
Source: www.pbs.org