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Top Song(s)
• Paul Whiteman - Smoke Gets in Your Eyes
• Duke Ellington - Cocktails For Two
• Bing Crosby - Love in Bloom
• Ray Noble - The Very Thought of You
• The Sons of the Pioneers - Tumbling Tumbleweeds
Top Film(s)
• It Happened One Night
• The Thin Man
• The Man Who Knew Too Much
• The Scarlet Empress
• The Black Cat
Best Selling Book(s)
• Mary Poppins - P.L. Travers
• I, Claudius - Robert Graves
• The Nine Tailors - Dorothy L. Sayers
• Tender Is the Night - F. Scott Fitzgerald
• Thank You, Jeeves - P.G. Wodehouse
Famous Deaths
• January 23 – Charles McLaren, 1st Baron Aberconway, Scottish politician and jurist
• February 19 – Caleb Bradham, American pharmacist, inventor of Pepsi
• March 27 – Francis William Reitz, 5th president of the Orange Free State
• April 21 – Carsten Borchgrevink, Anglo-Norwegian polar explorer
• June 19 – Prince Bernhard of Lippe
• July 3 - Emma Irene Åstrom, Finnish teacher, Finland's first female university graduate
• August 28 – Sir Edgeworth David, British-born Australian geologist and explorer
• October 9 - Saint Innocencio of Mary Immaculate, Spanish Roman Catholic priest and saint
• November 8 -Carlos Chagas, Brazilian sanitary physician, scientist, and microbiologist
• December 6 – Charles Michael, Duke of Mecklenburg, head of the House of Mecklenburg-Strelitz
Medical/Science/Technology
• Richard Tolman shows that black-body radiation in an expanding universe cools but remains thermal.
• The Mulliken scale of chemical element electronegativity is developed by Robert S. Mulliken.
• Norman Haworth and Edmund Hirst report the first synthesis of vitamin C.
• J. D. Bernal and Dorothy Crowfoot first successfully apply the technique of X-ray crystallography.
• The first commercial heavy water plant is built at Vemork in Norway.
• Penrose triangle devised.
• Sonoluminescence is discovered at the University of Cologne.
• Sodium thiopental, the first intravenous anesthetic, is first administered to human subjects.
• Austrian biochemist Regina Kapeller-Adler develops an innovative early pregnancy test.
• Percy Shaw patents the cat's eye road-safety device in Britain.
Political Events
• January 30 – Gold Reserve Act: All gold held in the Federal Reserve to be surrendered to the Department of the Treasury.
• February 23 – King Leopold III of Belgium succeeds to the throne, following the death of his father King Albert I.
• March 24 – The Tydings–McDuffie Act comes into effect, establishing the Philippine Commonwealth.
• May 15 - The United States Department of Justice offers a $25,000 reward for John Dillinger.
• May 30 – Everglades National Park is established.
• June 6 – New Deal: U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs the Securities Exchange Act into law.
• June 18 - US Highway planning surveys nationwide authorized.
• August 15 – The United States occupation of Haiti ends as the last Marines depart.
• November 2 – Bibb Graves is elected a 2nd term as the 38th governor of Alabama defeating Edmund H. Dryer.
• December 29 – Japan renounces the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922 and the London Naval Treaty of 1930.
National Events
• January 27 – Albert Einstein visits the White House.
• March 3 – John Dillinger escapes from jail in Crown Point, Indiana, using a wooden pistol.
• April 1 – Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker kill 2 young highway patrolmen near Grapevine, Texas.
• May 5 – The first Three Stooges short, Woman Haters, is released.
• May 16 – Teamsters in Minneapolis begin a strike that lasts until a settlement proposal is accepted on August 21.
• July 15 – The American film industry begins to rigorously enforce the Motion Picture Production Code.
• August 19 – The first All-American Soap Box Derby is held in Dayton, Ohio.
• September 8 – Off the New Jersey coast, a fire aboard the passenger liner SS Morro Castle kills 134 people.
• October 22 – "Pretty Boy" Floyd is shot and killed by FBI agents near East Liverpool, Ohio.
• December 26 – An American Airlines aircraft crashes in the Adirondack Mountains.
Worldwide Events
• January 26 - Nazi Germany & Poland sign 10-year non-aggression treaty.
• February 9 - Gaston Doumergue forms a new government in France.
• March 1 – Manchukuo, the Japanese puppet state in Manchuria established in 1932, proclaimed a monarchy under Puyi.
• March 20 – The Great Hakodate Fire kills at least 2,166 people in southern Hokkaido, Japan.
• June 14 – Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini meet for the first time, at the Venice Biennale.
• June 18 – The Indian Reorganization Act is enacted.
• August 15 – The United States Marine Corps leaves Haiti.
• September 22 – A gas explosion at Gresford Colliery in Wrexham, north-east Wales, kills 266 miners and rescuers.
• October 2 – A typhoon in Osaka and Kyoto, Japan, kills 1,660, injures 5,400, and destroys the rice harvest.
• October 16 – The Long March of the People's Liberation Army of the Chinese Communist Party begins.