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Top Song(s)
• Ben Bernie - Sweet Georgia Brown
• Vernon Dalhart - The Prisoner's Song
• Bessie Smith - St Louis Blues
• Ma Rainey - See See Rider Blues
• Eddie Cantor - If You Knew Susie (Like I Know Susie)
Top Film(s)
• The Gold Rush
• Battleship Potemkin
• Seven Chances
• The Phantom of the Opera
• The Big Parade
Best Selling Book(s)
• The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
• The Trial - Franz Kafka
• Mrs. Dalloway - Virginia Woolf
• An American Tragedy - Theodore Dreiser
• The Painted Veil - W. Somerset Maugham
Famous Deaths
• January 6 – Rafaela Porras Ayllon, Spanish Roman Catholic religious professed and saint
• February 4 – Robert Koldewey, German architect and archaeologist
• March 12 – Sun Yat-sen, Chinese physician, politician and revolutionary
• May 7 - William Lever, 1st Viscount Leverhulme, British industrialist, philanthropist and politician
• June 1 - Thomas R. Marshall, 28th Vice President of the United States
• July 2 – Nikolai Golitsyn, last Prime Minister of the Russian Empire
• August 12 – Severo Fernández, 24th President of Bolivia
• September 29 – Leon Bourgeois, French statesman, recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize
• October 10 – James Buchanan Duke, American tobacco and electric power industrialist
• December 9 – Pablo Iglesias Posse, co-founder of the Spanish Socialist Workers Party
Medical/Science/Technology
• Official opening of Thijsse's Hof, first wildlife garden in the Netherlands, in Bloemendaal near Haarlem.
• Extinction of the Bubal hartebeest in North Africa.
• Adams hemisphere-in-a-square projection published by American cartographer Oscar S. Adams.
• Rhenium is discovered by Walter Noddack and Ida Tacke in Berlin.
• The Fischer–Tropsch process for production of hydrocarbons is first developed by Franz Fischer and Hans Tropsch.
• Wolfgang Pauli announces his exclusion rule.
• Charles Francis Jenkins achieves the first synchronized transmission of pictures and sound.
• Charles F. Brannock files a patent for the Brannock Device for measuring shoe sizes.
• John Logie Baird successfully transmits the first television pictures with a greyscale image, in London.
• Julius Edgar Lilienfeld files the first patent for a form of field-effect transistor.
Political Events
• January 1 – The Syrian Federation is officially dissolved, Aleppo and Damascus having been replaced by the State of Syria.
• January 3 - Benito Mussolini dissolves the Italian parliament and proclaims himself dictator of Italy.
• February 13 - US Congress makes Supreme Court appeals more difficult.
• March 4 – Calvin Coolidge becomes the first president of the United States to have his inauguration broadcast on radio.
• March 21 – Tennessee Governor Austin Peay signs the Butler Act, prohibiting the teaching of evolution in the state's public schools.
• April 1 – The Patent and Trademark Office is transferred to the Department of Commerce.
• May 5 – The General Election Law is passed in Japan, extending suffrage to all males aged 25 and over.
• May 5 - Dayton teacher John T. Scopes arrested for teaching evolution in Tennessee.
• October 1 – Mount Rushmore National Memorial is dedicated in South Dakota.
• December 1 – The Locarno Treaties are signed in London, to secure the post-war European territorial settlement.
National Events
• February 21 – First issue of The New Yorker magazine is published under the editorship of Harold Ross.
• February 28 – The 1925 Charlevoix–Kamouraska earthquake strikes northeastern North America.
• March 18 – The Tri-State Tornado rampages through Missouri, Illinois and Indiana, killing 695 people and injuring 2,027.
• April 18 – University of Miami chartered in Coral Gables, Florida.
• May 8 – African American Tom Lee rescues 32 people from the sinking steamboat M.E. Norman on the Mississippi River.
• June 6 – The Chrysler Corporation is founded as an automobile manufacturer by Walter Percy Chrysler.
• June 17 – 1st National Spelling Bee held in Washington, D.C.
• July 7 – New York City Police Department Emergency Service Unit is created as the Emergency Automobile Squad.
• September 3 – The U.S. Navy dirigible Shenandoah breaks up in a squall, 14 crewmen are killed.
• November 21 – Lava Beds National Monument is established in California.
Worldwide Events
• January 1 - Norway's capital Christiania changes name to Oslo.
• January 30 - Turkish government throws out Constantine VI of Constantinople.
• March 6 – Pionerskaya Pravda, one of the oldest children's newspapers in Europe, is founded in the Soviet Union.
• May 29 – English explorer Percy Fawcett sends a last telegram to his wife before he disappears in the Amazon.
• July 18 – Adolf Hitler publishes Volume 1 of his personal manifesto Mein Kampf in Germany.
• July 21 – English racing motorist Malcolm Campbell becomes the first man to exceed 150 mph on land.
• August 1 – The New Cape Central Railway between Worcester and Voorbaai is incorporated into the South African Railways.
• August 10 - Hurricane strikes Borculo, 4 die.
• November 26 – Prajadhipok (Rama VII) is crowned as King of Siam.
• December 15 – Reza Shah takes the oath to become the first shah of Persia of the Pahlavi dynasty.