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Top Song(s)
• Harry Richman - Puttin' on the Ritz
• Ben Selvin - Happy Days Are Here Again
• Ruth Etting - Ten Cents a Dance
• Duke Ellington - Three Little Words
• Nat Shilkret - Dancing With Tears in My Eyes
Top Film(s)
• All Quiet on the Western Front
• Animal Crackers
• The Blue Angel
• Earth
• City Girl
Best Selling Book(s)
• Murder at the Vicarage - Agatha Christie
• The Little Engine That Could - Watty Piper
• As I Lay Dying - William Faulkner
• The Secret of the Old Clock - Carolyn Keene
• Strong Poison - Dorothy L. Sayers
Famous Deaths
• January 24 – Rebecca Latimer Felton, American writer, lecturer, reformer, and politician
• February 26 - Mary Whiton Calkins, American philosopher and psychologist
• March 16 – Miguel Primo de Rivera, Spanish military officer, Prime Minister of Spain
• May 13 – Fridtjof Nansen, Norwegian explorer, recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize
• June 10 – Adolf von Harnack, German Lutheran theologian and church historian
• July 7 – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, British fiction writer (Sherlock Holmes)
• July 19 - Oku Yasukata, Japanese field marshal, leading figure in the early Imperial Japanese Army
• October 4 – Olena Pchilka, Ukrainian writer, translator and publisher
• November 20 – Sir Neville Howse, Australian politician and recipient of the Victoria Cross
• November 28 – Constantine VI, Turkish-born bishop, briefly Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople
Medical/Science/Technology
• Pluto is identified by Clyde Tombaugh from photographs taken during January at the Lowell Observatory.
• Bernhard Schmidt invents the Schmidt Camera.
• Pavel Molchanov launches a radiosonde from Pavlovsk in the Soviet Union.
• Sydney Chapman explains the ozone-oxygen cycle.
• Neoprene is invented by DuPont.
• Danish painter Einar Wegener begins to undergo sexual reassignment surgery.
• Cecil George Paine, achieves the first recorded cure (of an eye infection) using penicillin.
• DPT vaccine (against diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis) is first used.
• Salginatobel Bridge in Switzerland, designed by Robert Maillart, opened.
• Rotolactor rotating platform milking machine first operates.
Political Events
• March 29 – Heinrich Bruning is appointed Chancellor of Germany.
• April 22 – The United States, United Kingdom and Japan sign the London Naval Treaty.
• May 16 – Rafael Trujillo is elected president of the Dominican Republic.
• June 14 – An act of Congress establishes the Federal Bureau of Narcotics.
• June 17 – U.S. President Herbert Hoover signs the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act into law.
• July 21 – The United States Department of Veterans Affairs is established.
• August 7 – R. B. Bennett takes office as the eleventh Prime Minister of Canada.
• October 3 – The German Socialist Labor Party in Poland – Left is founded.
• November 2 – Haile Selassie is crowned emperor of Ethiopia.
• December 2 – President Herbert Hoover goes before Congress and asks for a US$150 million public works program.
National Events
• January 13 – The Mickey Mouse comic strip makes its first appearance.
• March 6 - The first frozen foods of Clarence Birdseye go on sale in Springfield, Massachusetts.
• March 17 – The Empire State Building begins construction in New York City.
• March 20 – Colonel Sanders opens the first Kentucky Fried Chicken in North Corbin, Kentucky.
• March 31 – The Motion Picture Production Code (Hays Code) is instituted.
• April 6 – Jimmy Dewar invents Hostess Twinkies (snack cakes).
• April 17 – Neoprene is invented by DuPont.
• May 14 – Carlsbad Caverns National Park is established in New Mexico.
• August 6 – Judge Joseph Force Crater steps into a taxi in New York City and disappears.
• September 8 – 3M introduces Scotch Tape.
Worldwide Events
• March 2 - Mahatma Gandhi informs the British Viceroy of India that civil disobedience will begin the following week.
• March 6 - International Unemployment Day is observed in countries throughout the world.
• April 18 – The Chittagong Rebellion begins in India with the Chittagong armory raid.
• July 3–10 – The First Eastern Women's Congress takes place in Damascus in Syria.
• July 7 - The far-right Lapua Movement marches in Helsinki, Finland.
• July 29 – British airship R100 sets out for a successful 78-hour passage to Canada.
• August 27 – A military junta takes over in Peru.
• September 3 – The huge 1930 San Zenón hurricane in the Caribbean demolishes most of the city of Santo Domingo.
• September 17 – The Kurdish Ararat rebellion is suppressed by the Turks.
• December 24 – In London, inventor Harry Grindell Matthews demonstrates his device to project pictures on clouds.