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Top Song(s)
• Bing Crosby - Sweet Leilani
• Fred Astaire - They Can't Take That Away From Me
• Duke Ellington - Caravan
• Tommy Dorsey - Marie
• Ella Fitzgerald - Goodnight, My Love
Top Film(s)
• Grand Illusion
• The Awful Truth
• Make Way for Tomorrow
• Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
• A Day at the Races
Best Selling Book(s)
• The Hobbit, or There and Back Again - J.R.R. Tolkien
• Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
• On the Banks of Plum Creek - Laura Ingalls Wilder
• Death on the Nile - Agatha Christie
• Their Eyes Were Watching God - Zora Neale Hurston
Famous Deaths
• January 13 – Martin Johnson, American adventurer, documentary filmmaker
• February 14 - Vicente Vilar David, Spanish Roman Catholic priest, saint and martyr
• March 11 – Joseph S. Cullinan, American oil industrialist, founder of Texaco
• March 13 – Elihu Thomson, English-American engineer and inventor, co-founder of General Electric
• May 7 – Ernst A. Lehmann, German captain of the Hindenburg
• June 10 - Sir Robert Borden, Canadian lawyer, politician and 8th Prime Minister of Canada
• July 12 – Hugo Charteris, 11th Earl of Wemyss, British politician, public servant
• August 19 - Alexander Hotovitzky, Russian Orthodox priest, missionary and saint
• September 2 - Virendranath Chattopadhyaya, Indian revolutionary hero
• October 2 – Granville Ryrie, Australian Army general, politician, and diplomat
Medical/Science/Technology
• First total solar eclipse to exceed 7 minutes of totality in over 800 years.
• Last definite record of a Bali tiger shot.
• The citric acid cycle is finally identified by Hans Adolf Krebs.
• Carlo Perrier and Emilio Segre confirm discovery of Technetium.
• Meredith Crawford first publishes results of the cooperative pulling paradigm.
• The opioid Methadone is synthesized in Germany by scientists working at Hoechst AG.
• Otto Bayer and his coworkers at IG Farben in Leverkusen, Germany, first make polyurethanes.
• Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen publish a paper denying that gravitational waves can exist.
• Hans von Ohain begins ground-testing a turbojet engine.
• Tomlinson Moseley files the first patent for an electric toothbrush.
Political Events
• January 1 – Anastasio Somoza García becomes President of Nicaragua.
• January 20 – Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes swears in Franklin D. Roosevelt for a second term.
• February 5 – President Franklin D. Roosevelt proposes a plan to enlarge the Supreme Court of the United States.
• February 20 – Roberto Ortiz is elected president of Argentina.
• April 12 – The Supreme Court of the United States rules that the National Labor Relations Act is constitutional.
• June 14 – Pennsylvania becomes the first of the United States to celebrate Flag Day officially as a state holiday.
• July 22 – The U.S. Senate votes down Franklin D. Roosevelt's proposal to add more justices to the Supreme Court.
• October 1 - The Marijuana Tax Act becomes law in the United States.
• October 5 – Roosevelt gives his famous Quarantine Speech in Chicago.
• September 20 – USS Yorktown is commissioned.
National Events
• January 11 – The first issue of Look magazine goes on sale.
• January 31 – The Ohio River floods.
• February 16 – Wallace H. Carothers receives a patent for nylon.
• March 17 – The Atherton Report detailing vice and police corruption in San Francisco is released.
• March 26 - In Crystal City, Texas, spinach growers erect a statue of the cartoon character Popeye.
• May 6 – The German airship Hindenburg bursts into flame when mooring to a mast in Lakehurst, New Jersey.
• July 2 - Amelia Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan disappear after taking off from New Guinea.
• July 5 – The canned precooked meat product Spam is introduced by the Hormel company.
• December 21 – Walt Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, opens and becomes a smash hit.
• December 22 – The Lincoln Tunnel, under the Hudson River opens.
Worldwide Events
• February 8–27 – Spanish Civil War: Nationalist and Republican troops fight to a stalemate.
• April 1 - Aden becomes a British crown colony.
• April 20 – A fire in an elementary school in Kilingi-Nõmme, Estonia, kills 17 students and injures 50.
• May 12 – George VI and Elizabeth are crowned King and Queen of the United Kingdom and the British Dominions.
• June 21 – The coalition government of Léon Blum resigns in France.
• July 9 – 1937 Fox vault fire: The silent film archives of Fox Film Corporation are destroyed.
• August 13 – Second Sino-Japanese War: The Battle of Shanghai opens.
• September 2 – The Great Hong Kong Typhoon kills an estimated 11,000 persons.
• September 17 – Abraham Lincoln's head is dedicated at Mount Rushmore.
• November 11 – The Kogushi Sulfur Mine collapse, in western Gunma, Japan, kills at least 245 people.