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Top Song(s)
• Judy Garland - Over the Rainbow
• Glenn Miller - Moonlight Serenade
• Kate Smith - God Bless America
• Billie Holiday - Strange Fruit
• Larry Clinton - Deep Purple
Top Film(s)
• The Rules of the Game
• The Wizard of Oz
• Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
• Stagecoach
• Ninotchka
Best Selling Book(s)
• And Then There Were None - Agatha Christie
• The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
• Madeline - Ludwig Bemelmans
• By the Shores of Silver Lake - Laura Ingalls Wilder
• Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats - T.S. Eliot
Famous Deaths
• January 8 – Charles Eastman, American author, physician, reformer, helped found the Boy Scouts of America
• February 23 – Michael Knatchbull, 5th Baron Brabourne, British peer, soldier
• March 3 – Dimitrie Gerota, Romanian anatomist, physician
• April 1 – Anton Makarenko, Soviet educator, social worker and writer
• May 24 - Witmer Stone, American ornithologist, botanist, and mammologist
• June 30 – Eduardo Lopez Bustamante, Venezuelan poet, lawyer and journalist
• August 12 – Eulalio Gutiérrez, President of Mexico
• September 12 – Eliodoro Villazón, 27th President of Bolivia
• November 10 – Charlotte Despard, Anglo-Irish suffragist, socialist, pacifist
• December 16 – Juan Demóstenes Arosemena, 18th President of Panama
Medical/Science/Technology
• Robert Oppenheimer, with Hartland Snyder, predicts the existence black holes.
• DDT's properties as an insecticide are discovered by Paul Muller of Geigy.
• French physicist Marguerite Perey identifies francium.
• Edward Adelbert Doisy publishes the chemical structure of vitamin K.
• Cornelis de Waard begins to publish the Journal of Isaac Beeckman.
• Richard von Mises poses the birthday problem in probability.
• John H. Lawrence uses beams of energized neutrons to treat a patient with leukemia.
• Intramedullary rod is first used by German Gerhard Küntscher.
• First flight of the Lockheed P-38 Lightning in the United States.
• Hewlett-Packard is founded as an electronics company in Palo Alto, California.
Political Events
• January 3 - Gene Cox becomes 1st girl page in US House of Representatives.
• January 17 – Frank M. Dixon is sworn in as the 40th governor of Alabama replacing Bibb Graves.
• January 25 – Refik Saydam forms the new (11th) government of Turkey.
• February 27 – Sitdown strikes are outlawed by the Supreme Court of the United States.
• April 1 - US recognizes Francisco Franco's government in Spain at end of Spanish civil war.
• September 1 - General George C. Marshall becomes Chief of Staff of the United States Army.
• September 5 – World War II: The United States declares its neutrality in the war.
• September 11 – Mark Twain National Forest is established in Missouri.
• November 4 – President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs the Neutrality Act of 1939 into law.
• November 15 – President Franklin D. Roosevelt lays the cornerstone of the Jefferson Memorial.
National Events
• January 1 - Hewlett-Packard is founded by Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard in a garage in Palo Alto, California.
• January 5 – Pioneer aviator Amelia Earhart is officially declared dead after her 1937 disappearance.
• February 18 – The Golden Gate International Exposition opens in San Francisco.
• March 3 – Students at Harvard University demonstrate the new tradition of swallowing goldfish to reporters.
• April 19 - Connecticut finally approves Bill of Rights.
• April 30 – The 1939 New York World's Fair opens.
• May 16 - US food stamps are 1st issued in Rochester, New York.
• June 12 - Baseball Hall of Fame is dedicated in Cooperstown, New York.
• July 2 - The 1st World Science Fiction Convention opens in New York City.
• October 15 – The New York Municipal Airport (later renamed La Guardia Airport) is dedicated.
Worldwide Events
• January 14 – Norway claims Queen Maud Land in Antarctica.
• January 24 – An earthquake in Chile kills an estimated 30,000 people.
• March 1 – An Imperial Japanese Army ammunition dump explosion on the outskirts of Osaka kills 94.
• March 23 – The Slovak–Hungarian War begins.
• March 26 – Final offensive of the Spanish Civil War launched by the Nationalists.
• April 1 – The Spanish Civil War comes to an end when the last of the Republican forces surrender.
• May 9 – Spain leaves the League of Nations.
• July 27 – The first recorded snow falls in Auckland, New Zealand, since records began in 1853.
• September 3 – World War II: SS Athenia, a British ocean liner is torpedoed by a German submarine.
• October 14 – German submarine U-47 sinks the British battleship HMS Royal Oak at anchor in Scapa Flow.