February 19, 1953

1953Massimo Troisi, Italian actor, director, and screenwriter (died 1994)^[†]

Massimo Troisi was an Italian actor, cabaret performer, comedian, screenwriter and film director. He is best known for his works in the films I'm Starting back from Three (1981) and Il Postino: The Postman (1994), for which he was posthumously nominated for two Oscars. Nicknamed "the comedian of feelings", he is considered one of the most important actors of Italian theater and cinema.

1953Richard Rushall, British businessman (born 1864)^[†]

Captain Richard Boswell Rushall was a British sea captain and businessman who served as mayor of Rangoon, Burma, during the 1930s. He was the first Englishman to hold this position. Born in Braunston, Northamptonshire, Rushall was the eldest of eight children. After finishing school he left for sea, joined the UK's Merchant Navy, and became a ship's captain. He spent 20 years with the Irrawaddy Flotilla Company, of which 17 were in command of steamships belonging to the company. In 1908 he settled in Rangoon with his family, resigned from the Irrawaddy Flotilla Company and founded Rushall & Co. Ltd., a stevedoring and contracting business that employed between 3,000 and 4,000 men.

1953Book censorship in the United States: The Georgia Literature Commission is established.^[†]

Book censorship is censorship, which is the suppression of speech, public communication, and other information, that is the removal, suppression, or restricted circulation of literary, artistic, or educational material on the grounds that it is objectionable according to the standards applied by the censor. The first instance of book censorship in what is now known as the United States, took place in 1637 in modern-day Quincy, Massachusetts. While specific titles caused bouts of book censorship, with Uncle Tom’s Cabin frequently cited as the first book subject to a national ban, censorship of reading materials and their distribution remained sporadic in the United States until the Comstock Laws in 1873. It was in the early 20th century that book censorship became a more common practice and source of public debate. Throughout the 20th and early 21st centuries there have been waves of attempts at widespread book censorship in the US. Since 2022, the country has seen a dramatic increase of attempted and successful censorship, with a 63% rise in reported cases between 2022 and 2023, including a substantial rise in challenges filed to hundreds of books at a time. In recent years, about three-fourths of books subject to censorship in the US are for children, pre-teenagers, and teenagers.