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1938: Events and Inventions

Nov15

February, 1938. U.S. chemical company, du Pont, produces the first nylon-product, toothbrush bristles.

March 14, 1938 The Anchluss. Germany and Austria unite as one country. Hitler makes a speech in Vienna and tells the Austrian people, “The German nation will never again be rent apart.” Not much of a prophet, was he? By the way this event is the climax of the movie, The Sound of Music, as the von Trapp family must decide what to about the Anchluss and the German army’s orders for Herr von Trapp to report for duty.

April, 1938. US. chemist Roy J. Plunkett accidentally discovers a new non-stick substance and calls it Teflon.

May, 1938. Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini meet in Rome and pledge friendship and mutual cooperation.

Early June, 1938. Japanese bombers reduce the Chinese city of Canton to rubble. Nationalist leader General Chiang Kai-shek has no more troops available to defend the city.

July 14, 1938. Multimillionaire Howard Hughes flies around the world his in specially built Lockheed 14 Electra in a world’s record time, 3 days, 19 hours, and 8 minutes.

September 30, 1938. After threatening to invade the Czech territory of Sudetenland all year, Adolf Hitler invites Italian Duce Benito Mussolini, French Premier Edourd Deladier, and British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain to one last conference in Munich. The Czechs themselves are not invited. At the end of the conference, Hitler is promised that the British and the French will not oppose his takeover of Sudetenland, and Hitler promises no more German aggression in Europe. Prime Minister Chamberlain says that his policy of appeasement has led to “peace for our time.”

October, 1938. U.S. physicist and lawyer Chester Carlson makes the first successful Xerox copy with his Xerox machine.

November 10, 1938. Kristallnacht or “The Night of Broken Glass”. More than 7000 Jewish-owned stores and businesses are vandalized and looted. Synagogues are burned to the ground, and Jewish people are beaten in the streets in riots organized by the Nazi party.

1937: Books and Literature

Nov13

The first issue of Look magazine goes on sale in the United States.

Newbery Medal for children’s literature: Roller Skates by Ruth Sawyer.

Pulitzer Prize for Poetry: A Further Range by Robert Frost.

Pulitzer Prize for the Novel: Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell.

Published in 1937:
Dumb Witness, Death on the Nile, and Murder in the Mews by Agatha Christie.
Out of Africa by Isak Dineson.
To Have and Have Not by Ernest Hemingway. More about Hemingway.
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston.
Life and Death of a Spanish Town by Elliot Paul.
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck.
The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien. I was blogging through The Hobbit earlier this year as Z-baby and I were reading it aloud, but I only made it through chapter seven with the blog entries. Z-baby and I finished the entire book and enjoyed it very much.

1937: Events and Inventions

Nov13

January, 1937. Leading Communists go on trial in Russia, accused of Trotskyism and participating in a plot to overthrow Stalin and his government. The Soviet Union finally executes thirty-one people for Trotskyism. In August, Stain continues The Great Purge in which hundreds of thousands of political opponents, peasants, writers, artists, intellectuals, Trotskyites, and military leaders are killed for disagreeing with or offending Stalin in some way.

February, 1937. Spanish Civil War. Battle of Jarama: Nationalist (Franco’s fascist Falangists) and government (Republican and Communist) troops fight to a stalemate. Italian troops and German tanks help the Nationalists. British, Irish, Balkan, French and Belgian volunteers fight in support of the Republican government.

April 26, 1937. German planes bomb Guernica, Spain in support of Francisco Franco’s Nationalists, killing 200 to 300 civilians. The Spanish Republican government commissions Pablo Picasso to create this large mural for the Spanish display at the Paris International Exposition in June, 1937.

'Le fameux Guernica (1937) de Pablo Picasso au musée Reine Sofia à Madrid' photo (c) 2011, Tab59 - license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/

May 6, 1937. The German airship Hindenburg explodes on its approach to Lakehurst Field, NJ after a transatlantic flight from Frankfort, Germany. 35 of the 97 passengers and crew on board die in the explosion.

'Golden Gate Bridge' photo (c) 2007, Salim Virji - license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/May 27-28, 1937. Golden Gate Bridge opens to pedestrian traffic, creating a vital link between San Francisco and Marin County. The next day, President Franklin D. Roosevelt pushes a button in Washington, D.C., signaling the start of vehicle traffic over the Golden Gate Bridge. At 1.7 miles the bridge is the longest suspension bridge in the world in 1937.

May 28, 1937. Neville Chamberlain becomes Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.

June 3, 1937. Wallis Simpson marries the Duke of Windsor, the former Edward VIII of the United Kingdom, in France.

July 2, 1937. Amelia Earhart disappears after taking off from New Guinea during her attempt to become the first woman to fly around the world.

July 7, 1937. Japanese troops open fire on a Chinese patrol outside the Chinese capital, Peking (Beijing). The Japanese claim the Chinese provoked the exchange of fire, but the Chinese are claiming a Japanese invasion. This incident begins the Second Sino-Japanese War as Japan attempts to take over mainland China. By the end of 1937, Japan will control most of the coastal cities of China, including Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai, Nanjing, and others.

December 13, 1937. The city of Nanjing, China falls to the Japanese invaders. Up to 300,000 Chinese are brutally murdered by the Japanese army in the Nanking Massacre or the Rape of Nanjing during the next six months of Japanese control.

1936: Books and Literature

Nov12

Published in 1936:
The A.B.C. Murders, Murder in Mesopotamia, and Cards on the Table by Agatha Christie.
Double Indemnity by James M. Cain. Cain’s novella is the source for the screenplay for this movie that I watched last summer, starring Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck.
Jamaica Inn by Daphne duMaurier.
Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell. This book was the #1 fiction bestseller of 1936, and of course, it went on to become the 1939 award-winning movie of the same title.
The Allegory of Love by C.S. Lewis.
Absalom! Absalom! by William Faulkner.
How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie.

'Life' photo (c) 2007, Jennifer - license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/Also in 1936:
Life magazine is first published.

The Carnegie Medal for excellence in children’s literature, published in the U.K., is created and awarded for the first time to Arthur Ransome for his book Pigeon Post.

Newbery Medal for children’s literature is awarded to Carol Ryrie Brink’s Caddie Woodlawn. Caddie has gotten some flack and bad press in recent years for its stereotypical and inaccurate portrayal of Native Americans. But I think this practice of reevaluating classic literature by modern PC standards is spoiler-y. Caddie Woodlawn is a good story, and the Native Americans in the book are portrayed as a child of Caddie Woodlawn’s era would probably have viewed them. ‘Nuff said.

Best-selling authors of 1936, besides Margaret Mitchell were: Sinclair Lewis, Lloyd C. Douglas, Rebecca West, Aldous Huxley, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, and Clarence Day.

1936: Events and Inventions

Nov11

January 28, 1936. King George V of England dies, leaving his oldest son Edward to become king.

'Volkswagen Käfer' photo (c) 2009, Dmitry Klimenko - license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/2.0/February 26, 1936. The “People’s Car”, Volkswagen, is born. Hitler inaugurates the first factory to build the cars that he believes will do for Germany what Henry Ford’s automobiles did for the United States, make ordinary Germans, car owners and drivers.

March 7, 1936. In violation of the Versailles Treaty, Hitler’s troops march into the Rhineland, territory that was ceded by Germany to France after World War I. Hitler is gambling that the French will not want to go to war over the Rhineland, and they don’t. Hitler proposes a new treaty that will “guarantee peace for the next 25 years.”

April 28, 1936. Prince Farouk becomes King of Egypt, following the death of his father.

April 30, 1936. The Italian army takes Addis Ababa, the capital of Abyssinia (Ethiopia), crushing the forces of Haile Selassie, the current ruler of Ethiopia. The Italian air force drops mustard gas on the civilians and military forces in order to pacify the capital. By May 9th, Mussolini boasts, “Italy at last has her empire. It is a Fascist empire because it bears the indestructible sign of the will and power of Rome.” (Fascism, according to my dictionary, “tends to include a belief in the supremacy of one national or ethnic group, a contempt for democracy, an insistence on obedience to a powerful leader, and a strong demagogic approach.”)

June 8, 1936. New French Premier Leon Blum, a socialist, promises the French people, suffering from the worldwide economic depression, pay raises, a 40-hour work week, two weeks per year of paid vacation, collective bargaining rights, and binding arbitration in labor disputes.

July, 1936. The giant German airship, Hindenburg, crosses the Atlantic in a record time of 46 hours.

'El Correo Español' photo (c) 2010, Las Mentiras de El Correo Español - license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/2.0/July 19, 1936. Generalissimo Francisco Franco lands Fascist troops in Cadiz coming from Morocco to take over the Spanish government. Franco’s troops move through Spain to Madrid, the capital, and tales of horrible atrocities are told from both sides of the civil war. In Barcelona and Madrid, there are reports of assassinations and house searches for rebels and arms. In Badajoz in August Fascist soldiers line Loyalists (Republicans) up against a wall and shoot them after a Fascist victory.

October, 1936. The $120 million Hoover Dam opens on the Colorado River between Nevada and Arizona.

December 11, 1936. King Edward VIII of England abdicates the throne so that he can marry Wallis Simpson, a twice-divorced American. The king will be succeeded by his younger brother, Albert George (George VI). (Watch the Academy Award-winning movie, The King’s Speech, to see a dramatized version of the year’s events in regard to the British monarchy and the effects of those events on younger brother Albert George, “Bertie”. It’s a wonderfully inspiring movie.)

1934: Movies

Nov11

Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night, starring Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert, becomes a smash hit and the first of Capra’s great screen classics. It Happened One Night is the first film to win all 5 of the major Academy Awards – Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Screenplay, Best Director, and Best Picture. Gable and Colbert receive their only Oscars for this film.

Walt Disney’s Donald Duck makes his first appearance in the cartoon, The Little Wise Hen.

Dashiell Hammett’s The Thin Man detective thriller novel becomes a movie, starring William Powell and Myrna Loy as Nick and Nora Charles.

In Germany, Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler’s favorite film director, makes a documentary about the 1934 Nuremberg congress of the Nazi Party titled Triumph of the Will. The film made her famous because of the innovative techniques she used: moving cameras, the use of long focus lenses to create a distorted perspective, aerial photography, and revolutionary approach to the use of music and cinematography. It has become an example of excellent filmmaking used as propaganda.

You can watch the entire movie on youtube. I watched the first half hour of the nearly two hour film, and it’s worth seeing to begin to understand what a phenomenon, a cult celebrity, Hitler had already become by 1934. In the movie Hitler comes to Nuremberg out of the clouds (in an airplane), like a god. And the people, women and children mostly, line the streets and shout out their praise and adulation. The music is joyful and triumphant. Night falls on a waiting, expectant crowd who are only kept from mobbing the building where Hitler has come to stay by brown-shirted Nazi guards.

Then, dawn breaks upon rows and rows of tents where the strong young Aryan boys and men come out and meet the day. They engage in sporting contests, running and wrestling. (It is sobering to think of how many of those boys would be dead within ten years.) Later in the film, Hitler reviews rank upon rank of the “German Labor Service”, young men who have “enlisted” to build the new Germany. There is martial singing, and shouting, and fireworks, and the young men are exhorted to “work for the Fuhrer.”

Amazing stuff.

Riefenstahl wrote in her memoir about hearing Hitler speak for the first time: “”I had an almost apocalyptic vision that I was never able to forget. It seemed as if the Earth’s surface were spreading out in front of me, like a hemisphere that suddenly splits apart in the middle, spewing out an enormous jet of water, so powerful that it touched the sky and shook the earth.” She was, indeed, a Nazi true believer, as were many, many of the German people.

Dave at Night by Gail Carson Levine

Nov9

My daughter picked up this book and said, “This book sure doesn’t look like a book by my favorite author of Ella Enchanted and The Two Princesses of Bammarre.”

If you’re looking for more reworked fairy tales, the genre in which Ms. Levine has become famous, don’t look at Dave at Night. Nevertheless, it is a story about an orphan boy who has adventures, meets a “princess”, and frees his buddies from an evil “giant.” So, maybe it is a reworked fairy tale, set in 1920’s Harlem.

Dave Caros is Jewish, and when his beloved papa dies after falling off the roof of a house he was helping to build, Dave is left with his (evil) stepmother Ida who either can’t or doesn’t want to take care of him. So, he is sent to the HHB, Hebrew Home for Boys. Unfortunately, the HHB has a lot of other names, made up by the boys who live there: The Hell Hole for Brats, Happy House of Bullies, Hopeless House of Beggars, Hollow Home for Boys—you get the idea.

Other than the fairy tale parallels, one interesting thing about the book that it’s told in first person from Dave’s point of view; however, at least as an adult, it was always obvious to me that Dave might not be entirely accurate in his depiction of the HHB as a hellhole and his family as uncaring and mean. Yes, Mr. Doom, the orphanage administrator and the villain of the piece, is a paskudnyak, as one of the characters in the book calls hims, a real blackguard. But maybe the HHB isn’t quite as bad as Dave makes out. And maybe there are compensations for the suffering, deprivation, and abuse that the boys go through: buddies, art classes, a chance to live in relative safety.

Dave is a wonderful narrator. Everything for him is simple, as a child would think it should be. And the story paints a vivid picture of Harlem in the 1920’s as Dave escapes from the orphanage during the night and goes to rent parties and mixes in high society with the goniff, Solly. Dave and Solly meet and tell fortunes for bootleggers, business people, and 1920’s guys and dolls. And, of course, everything ends happily, just as it should in a fairy tale with a boy hero like Dave.

Recommended for aficionados of hero tales, 1920’s Harlem, Jewish cultural history, orphan stories, and just good middle grade fiction. Ms. Levine says it may be her favorite of all of her books.

By the way, I like the cover art by Loren Long on my library copy of the book much better than I like the above cover, but the picture above was what was at Amazon. My cover is the one that’s pictured at Ms.Levine’s site, and I think it’s a lovely work of art.

1935: Events and Inventions

Nov7

March 16, 1935. Adolf Hitler announces German rearmament in violation of the Versailles Treaty.

'Middle East, 1925' photo (c) 2007, Gabriel - license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/March 21, 1935. Persia is officially renamed Iran.

June, 1935. Bolivia and Paraguay sign an armistice to end their three-year dispute over the Chaco region.

June 10, 1935. Alcoholics Anonymous is founded in Akron, Ohio by William G. Wilson and Dr. Robert Smith.

August 14, 1935. United States President Franklin Roosevelt signs the Social Security Act into law, introducing welfare for the sick, old, and unemployed.

September 15, 1935. Hitler’s Nuremburg Decrees deprive German Jews of their citizenship and ban them from a long list of jobs, including teaching and journalism. Existing marriages between non-Jews and Jews are now illegal, and those couples who will not divorce are subject to imprisonment.

October 3, 1935. Italy invades Abyssinia (Ethiopia) in North Africa.

October 20, 1935. After 12 months of long and difficult marching and fighting, Mao and his diminished Communist army reach relative safety. The Long March is ended, but the Communists are still on the defensive against Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang troops.

November 14-15 1935. Franklin D. Roosevelt proclaims Philippine Islands a free commonwealth. The Commonwealth of Philippines becomes semi-independent with its own elected government and constitution and is promised full independence after a suitable period of time.

'Humble Beginning' photo (c) 2009, JD Hancock - license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

December, 1935. Monopoly, a new board game produced by the company Parker Brothers, goes on sale in the U.S. for $2.50.

1934: Events and Inventions

Nov7

February 21, 1934. Nicaraguan rebel leader Augusto César Sandino is assassinated in Managua, Nicaragua by the National Guard controlled by General Anastasio Somoza García, who will go on to seize power in a coup d’état two years later, establishing a family dynasty that would rule Nicaragua for over forty years.

March 1, 1934. The Japanese install Pu-yi, once Emperor of China, as puppet emperor of Manchukuo (Manchuria). The young emperor will only be allowed to carry out Japanese policies for the former province of China called by its new Japanese name, Manchukuo.

'Hitler and Rohm, leader of the Nazi SA' photo (c) 2010, Rupert Colley - license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/May 23, 1934. Outlaw bank robbers Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker are shot dead by police in an ambush in Louisiana. The couple had been engaged in a crime spree across Texas, robbing banks, small stores and gas stations. They also killed at least nine police officers and several civilians.

May 28, 1934. In Canada, the Dionne quintuplets are born, the first set of quintuplets to survive birth. After four months with their family, they are made wards of the King for the next nine years under the Dionne Quintuplets’ Guardianship Act, 1935. The government and those around them begin to profit by making them a significant tourist attraction in Ontario.

June 30, 1934. Hitler arrests and executes the leaders of the German Storm Troopers (SA or “brown shirts”) in what is called “The Night of the Long Knives.” Hitler has been worried about Brownshirt leader Ernst Rohm’s independence and lack of allegiance to Hitler alone. (The picture shows Hitler with Rohm who was executed on Hitler’s orders.)

July 25, 1935. Austrian Nazis assassinate chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss during a failed coup attempt.

August 2, 1934. Adolf Hitler becomes Führer of Germany, becoming head of state as well as Chancellor.

August 18, 1934. Alcatraz Prison, built on a large rock in the middle of San Francisco Bay, opens as an “escape-proof” federal penitentiary, designed to house the most dangerous of federal criminals.

'Alcatraz' photo (c) 2008, Dennis Matheson - license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/

October 9, 1934. King Alexander of Yugoslavia and French foreign minister Louis Barthou are assassinated in Marseilles by a Croatian nationalist.

October 16, 1934. The Long March of the Chinese Communists begins. After breaking through a Nationalist Chinese blockade, Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai lead the Communist First Front Army on a 600-mile journey across southwestern China. Pursued by the Nationalist Chinese Army (Kuomingtang) and dogged by poor weather conditions, food, clothing and equipment shortages, and hostile local tribes, the Communists will escape to Shaanxi Province but will lose nine-tenths of their army on the way.