In the mood for a good movie? Some toe-tapping music? A thrilling book? ON THIS DAY will lead you to new possibilities every day, tied to interesting moments from history and popular culture. Whether it’s streamable and downloadable music and film, e-books and e-audio, or physical books and DVDs, we hope you’ll find something to enjoy as you pick up a few bits of history each day.

	On this day in 1883, Lon Chaney was born. Chaney was among the first American movie stars, starring in more than 70 silent films in the 1910s and 1920s. Many of those films have been lost, but in Chaney's surviving work, his versatility is clear. He was particularly renowned for his extraordinary skills with makeup, which earned him the nickname "Man of a Thousand Faces." In his only sound film, Chaney suggested that he might have had equal success in the talkies; he played a ventriloquist, and created a set of voices so distinct from another that he eventually signed a sworn affidavit that it really was him providing the voices for five different characters. Chaney's classics The Hunchback of Notre Dame and The Phantom of the Opera are available for streaming at Hoopla.
	On this day in 1895, Albert Hunter was born. Hunter began performing in her teens, and for forty years, was a popular jazz and blues singer in the United States and Europe. She retired from performing after her mother's death in 1957, went to nursing school, and worked as a nurse for twenty years. In 1977, when the hospital where she worked thought she had reached the mandatory retirement age of 70 -- she was actually 82, having lied about her age when she started working -- she returned to music, and recorded several more albums before her death in 1984. Several albums from both phases of Hunter's career are available for streaming or download at Freegal.
	And on this day in 1942, Samuel R. Delany was born. Delany has written several volumes of literary criticism and memoirs, but is best known for his fiction, particularly his science fiction. His characters are often writers, and the relationships among storytelling, memory, and mythology are common themes in his work. His 1966 novel Babel-17 won the Nebula Award for Best Novel; it's the story of a starship captain / poet who finds that the alien language she is learning is altering her view of the world. Babel-17 is available as an e-book or e-audio from OverDrive.