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Top Song(s)
• Fred Astaire - Cheek to Cheek
• Shirley Temple - On The Good Ship Lollipop
• Ray Noble - Isle of Capri
• Eddy Duchin - Lovely to Look At
• Cole Porter - You're the Top
Top Film(s)
• Bride of Frankenstein
• A Night at the Opera
• The 39 Steps
• Top Hat
• Captain Blood
Best Selling Book(s)
• Little House on the Prairie - Laura Ingalls Wilder
• National Velvet - Enid Bagnold
• Gaudy Night - Dorothy L. Sayers
• The Strange Death of Liberal England - George Dangerfield
• Mary Poppins Comes Back - P.L. Travers
Famous Deaths
• February 3 – Hugo Junkers, German industrialist and aircraft designer
• March 6 - Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., U.S. Supreme Court Justice
• March 29 – Sir Edward Albert Sharpey-Schafer, English physiologist, pioneer in endocrinology
• May 21 - Jane Addams, American social worker, recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize
• June 6 - Julian Byng, 1st Viscount Byng of Vimy, British general, 12th Governor General of Canada
• July 12 – Alfred Dreyfus, French military officer, subject of the Dreyfus affair
• August 22 - Pavlos Kountouriotis, Greek admiral, 1st President of Greece
• September 8 - Takejir? Tokonami, Japanese politician, Home Minister, Railway Minister
• October 19 – Maria Cederschiöld, Swedish journalist and women's rights activist
• November 6 – Henry Fairfield Osborn, American geologist, paleontologist
Medical/Science/Technology
• Opening of the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles.
• Wallace Carothers first synthesizes the synthetic polymer nylon at Wilmington, Delaware.
• Vitamin E is first isolated in a pure form by Gladys Anderson Emerson.
• Eastman Kodak first market Kodachrome subtractive color reversal film as 16 mm movie film.
• English botanist Arthur Tansley introduces the concept of the ecosystem.
• G Farben are granted a patent for the medical application of the first sulfonamide prodrug, Sulfonamidochrysoidine.
• A.C. Hardy patents the spectrophotometer.
• Robert Watson-Watt and Arnold Wilkins first demonstrate the reflection of radio waves from an aircraft.
• Iceland becomes the first country to legalize abortion on medical grounds.
• First vaccine for yellow fever.
Political Events
• January 4 – Dry Tortugas National Park is established in the Florida Keys, United States.
• January 14 – Bibb Graves is sworn in for a second consecutive term as the 38th governor of Alabama.
• February 22 – Airplanes are banned from flying over the White House.
• May 6 – New Deal: Executive Order 7034 creates the Works Progress Administration (WPA).
• May 27 – The Supreme Court of the United States declares that the National Industrial Recovery Act, is unconstitutional.
• June 12–13 – Senator Huey Long of Louisiana makes the longest speech on Senate record.
• August 14 – U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs the Social Security Act into law.
• August 31 – As part of United States non-interventionism, the first of the Neutrality Acts of 1930s is passed.
• September 8 - Carl Weiss fatally wounds Huey Long, U.S. Senator from Louisiana.
• September 30 – U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt dedicates Hoover Dam.
National Events
• January 11 – Amelia Earhart becomes the first person to fly solo from Hawaii to California.
• January 19 – Coopers Inc. sells the world's first men's briefs, as "jockeys", in Chicago.
• February 13 – Richard Hauptmann is convicted and sentenced to death for the Lindbergh kidnapping.
• May 24 – The first nighttime Major League Baseball game is played.
• June – National Youth Administration established.
• June 28 - FDR orders a federal gold vault to be built at Fort Knox, Kentucky.
• June 10 – Alcoholics Anonymous is founded in Akron, Ohio.
• September 24 – Earl W. Bascom and his brother Weldon produce the first night rodeo held outdoors.
• December 5 – Mary McLeod Bethune founds the National Council of Negro Women.
• December 26 – Shenandoah National Park is established within the Virginia.
Worldwide Events
• February 6 – Parker Brothers begins selling the board game Monopoly in the United States.
• February 26 - Robert Watson-Watt first demonstrates the use of radar to detect aircraft.
• March 16 – Adolf Hitler announces German re-armament in violation of the 1919 Treaty of Versailles.
• May 15 – Joseph Stalin opens the Moscow Metro to the public.
• May 31 - A 7.1 magnitude earthquake destroys Quetta in modern-day Pakistan, killing 40,000.
• June 12 – The Chaco War between Paraguay and Bolivia ends.
• August 13 – An estimated 250 people are killed when a dam bursts near Ovada, Italy.
• September 15 – The Nuremberg Laws go into effect in Germany, removing citizenship from Jews.
• October 6 – The wreckage of the RMS Lusitania is discovered.
• December 10 – Hanshin Tigers, a well known professional baseball club of Japan, is founded in Osaka.