January 5: Samuel Beckett's play Waiting For Godot has its first public stage premiere in French as En attendant Godot at the Theatre de Babylone in Paris.

January 6: The Asian Socialist Conference opens in Rangoon, Burma.

January 7: President Harry S. Truman announces the United States has developed a hydrogen bomb.

January 12: Estonian emigres found a government in exile in Oslo.

January 14: Marshal Josip Broz Tito is chosen President of Yugoslavia. - The CIA-sponsored Robertson Panel first meets to discuss the UFO phenomenon.

January 15: Georg Dertinger, foreign minister of East Germany, is arrested for spying.

January 19: 71.1% of all television sets in the United States are tuned in to I Love Lucy to watch Lucy give birth.

January 20: Dwight D. Eisenhower succeeds Harry S. Truman as the 34th President of the United States.

January 22: The Crucible, a drama by Arthur Miller, opens on Broadway.

January 24: Mau Mau Uprising: Rebels in Kenya kill the Ruck family (father, mother and six-year-old son). - Walter Ulbricht announces that the agriculture will be collectivized in East Germany.

January 28: Derek Bentley is executed for murder at Wandsworth Prison in London.

January 31-February 1: The North Sea flood of 1953 kills 1,836 people in the southwestern Netherlands (especially Zeeland), 307 in the United Kingdom and several hundred at sea, including 133 on the ferry MV Princess Victoria in the Irish Sea. (source: Wikipedia)