February 8 · This Day in America
Papers are filed in the District of Columbia, and the Boy Scouts of America comes into legal existence. Behind it is a Chicago publisher, W.D. Boyce, and a story Scouts still tell as legend: lost in a London fog, Boyce was guided to his destination by a boy who then refused a tip, because, he said, a Scout does a good turn for nothing. Whatever the truth of the fog, the institution it helped inspire would shape the boyhoods of tens of millions of Americans, presidents and astronauts and ordinary citizens among them, around a simple idea, that character can be taught, and that a person should leave things better than they found them. From a filing cabinet in 1910 grew one of the largest youth movements the country has ever known.
Source: oa-scouting.org
Also on this day · 1915
D.W. Griffith's three-hour epic opens in Los Angeles. It is the first American feature film, and it invents or perfects techniques, the close-up, the moving camera, the cross-cut, that all cinema still uses. It is also vicious racist propaganda that glorifies the Ku Klux Klan and helped revive it. Both things are true at once, and the country has had to hold them together ever since: that a thing can be a landmark and a wound in the same frame.
Source: www.history.com