Pulitzer Prize for Poetry: Robert Frost: Collected Poems

Newbery Award: The Cat Who Went to Heaven by Elizabeth Coatsworth (Macmillan)

The Story of Babar by Jean and Cecile de Brunhoff is an instant best-seller in Europe.

Also published in 1931:
The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck. Also an instant bestseller. Ms. Buck became famous for her novels of ancient and contemporary China.

Joy of Cooking by Irma Rombauer. I have a copy of this classic that I got as a wedding present, and I have consulted it from time to time. The cookbook’s greatest strength is that it has recipes for almost any dish that one would think of cooking. It was first privately published in 1931 by Irma S. Rombauer, a homemaker in St. Louis, Missouri, who was struggling emotionally and financially after her husband’s suicide the previous year. In 1936, a commercial publisher, Bobbs-Merrill, picked up the book.
The 1936 introduction to Joy of Cooking:

“Although I have been modernized by life and my children, my roots are Victorian. This book reflects my life. It was once merely a private record of what the family wanted, of what friends recommended and of dishes made familiar by foreign travel and given an acceptable Americanization. In the course of time there have been added to the rather weighty stand-bye of my youth the ever-increasing lighter culinary touches of the day. So the record, which to begin with was a collection such as every kitchen-minded woman possesses, has grown in breadth and bulk until it now covers a wide range.”

March 3, 1931. The bill designating The Star Spangled Banner as the United States’ national anthem is passed by Congress and signed into law by President Hoover on this date. Read Peter Spier’s The Star Spangled Banner, not just for the history, but also for the pictures.

April 14, 1931. King Alfonso XIII of Spain abdicates the throne, and Spain declares itself a republic after Republicans win in a general election called after the resignation last year of military dictator Miguel Primo de Rivera.

May 1931. Soviet leader Joseph Stalin announces his second Five Year Plan for the collectivization of Soviet farming and the industrialization of the country.

May 11, 1931. The Creditanstalt, Austria’s largest bank, goes bankrupt, beginning the banking collapse in Central Europe that causes a worldwide financial meltdown. In June, German Chancellor Dr. Heinrich Brüning visits London, where he warns the British Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald that the collapse of the Austrian banking system, caused by the bankruptcy of the Creditanstalt, has left the entire German banking system on the verge of collapse.

July, 1931. The Benguella-Katanga, the first trans-African railroad, opens in southern Africa. the railroad links the Atlantic port of Lobito in Angola with the copper mines of Katanga in Belgian Congo. More about the railway and its history.

August 31, 1931. The Yangtze River floods, leaving 23 million people homeless.

September 18, 1931. The Japanese invade Manchuria in northern China.

October 17, 1931. Al “Scarface” Capone, Chicago gangster, is jailed for income tax fraud. The 28 year old FBI agent who leads the investigation of Capone, Elliot Ness, becomes a hero. His team of law enforcement agents is known as “The Untouchables” for their bravery and honesty in corrupt Chicago.

November, 1931. Mao Zedong and his communist associates, with the help of the Soviet Union, declare a Chinese Soviet Republic in north-central China. The majority of China is still under the control of the nationalist Chinese government (Kuomintang) of General Chiang Kai-shek.

December 11, 1931. The British Parliament enacts the Statute of Westminster, which establishes a status of legislative equality between the self-governing dominions of the Commonwealth of Australia, the Dominion of Canada, the Irish Free State, Newfoundland, the Dominion of New Zealand, and the Union of South Africa. India still has not been given dominion or commonwealth status.

January 5, 1930. Russian leader Joseph Stalin declares that all farmland in the Soviet Union will henceforth be “collectively owned” by the people. Russian peasant farmers will now be expected to work on huge state-owned collective farms instead of framing their own small plots of land.

February, 1930. In Spain, General Primero de Rivera resigns his military dictatorship. Riots and labor strikes ensue as the government is in disarray.

February 18, 1930. U.S. astronomer Clyde Tombaugh spots a new planet in our solar system and names it Pluto after the Roman god of the underworld. For more information about the life and history of the planet/non-planet Pluto, see Neil deGrasse Tyson’s book, The Pluto Files. Reviewed here by S. Krishna. Reviewed by Carrie at Five Minutes for Books.

February 26, 1930. New York City installs traffic lights at Manhattan intersections. The traffic light was developed by black businessman Garrett A. Morgan, who also invented the gas mask.

April 6, 1930. Mahatma Gandhi reaches the coast after a 240-mile protest march across India. There he breaks British laws by making salt in a protest against the British salt tax, a tax that Gandhi has chosen as the first target of satyagraha, his program of non-violent protest and civil disobedience. Read more at Wikipedia about the Salt March.

April 24, 1930. Amy Johnson arrives in Darwin, Australia, the first woman to fly solo from Britain to Australia. The 10,000 mile flight took the aviator nineteen days in her aircraft called Gipsy Moth.

September 14, 1930. National Socialists (Nazis) win 107 seats in the German Parliament (18.3% of all the votes), making them the second largest party in Germany.

October, 1930. Dr. Gertulio Vargas takes power in Brazil after a revolt topples the President-elect, Dr. Julio Prestes and his party which has ruled Brazil for the past forty years.

December, 1930. Dr. Karl Landsteiner wins the Nobel Prize in Medicine for his work in identifying the major blood types: A, B, AB, and O.

Sometime in 1930: The chocolate chip cookie is accidentally invented by Ruth Wakefield of Whitman, Massachusetts. “Wakefield is said to have been making chocolate cookies and on running out of regular baker’s chocolate, substituted broken pieces of semi-sweet chocolate from Nestlé thinking that they would melt and mix into the batter. They did not and the chocolate chip cookie was born.”

This book is one in a series of books called Fabulous Fashions of the Decades, published by Enslow Publishers. I found it on the “new books” shelf at my library in the children’s section, and thought I’d give it a try as a part of my ongoing twentieth century history studies this year.

The book includes lots of good information and photographs, and I learned a few things. I already knew about bobbed haircuts and cloche hats and flapper beads and raccoon coats. But I never connected “bobby pins” with bobbed hair.

“The bobby pin was invented to keep bobbed hair looking neat.”

And did you know that one actress in particular was famous for her “Dutch boy” haircut?

“Actress Louise Brooks was famous for her Dutch boy haircut.”

It also never occurred to me to connect the silky, Egyptian tunic-like fashions of the twenties with the discovery of King Tut’s tomb in 1922.

“People became fascinated with all things Egyptian. There were clothes and shoes with heiroglyphics. Women wore Cleopatra earrings, snake bracelets, and scarab-shaped jewelry.”

There’s a bibliography in the back of the book for the purpose of more research, and there are addresses in the back of the book for a couple of websites where readers can see more fashions of the twenties:

Fashion-Era, Flapper Fashion 1920’s
1920-30.com, Women’s Fashions 1920s

This book, and others in the series, provide a good introduction to fashion history in the twentieth century.

This post is linked to Nonfiction Monday, hosted this week at Jean Little Library.

Newbery Medal for children’s literature:
Hitty, Her First Hundred Years by Rachel Field is a doll story that I never much cared for. However, Amy at Hope Is the Word blog says of Hitty, “I never once grew tired of this story; on the contrary, I was eager each time I picked it up to find out what Hitty was going to experience next. My girls seemed to love it as much as I did.” So maybe I just have an impaired attention span.

Nobel Prize for Literature:
Sinclair Lewis, “”for his vigorous and graphic art of description and his ability to create, with wit and humour, new types of characters.” Lewis was the first U.S. writer to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature, and he didn’t turn it down as he had his Pulitzer in 1926. Lewis said in a letter in1926 that “by accepting the prizes and approval of these vague institutions we are admitting their authority, publicly confirming them as the final judges of literary excellence, and I inquire whether any prize is worth that subservience.” I suppose Scandinavian judges of literary excellence are more to trusted/served.

Pulitzer Prize for Drama: Marc Connelly, The Green Pastures. I read this play a long time ago from an anthology I found in a closet somewhere. It’s a black dialect version of the highlights of Bible stories, adapted by a white playwright (Marc Connelly) from a book of stories written by another white Southerner (Roark Bradford). I remember being fascinated by the play, but I would imagine that it would be politically incorrect and maybe even offensive to me nowadays.

Pulitzer Prize for Poetry: Conrad Aiken: Selected Poems

Pulitzer Prize for the Novel: Laughing Boy: A Navaho Love Story by Oliver La Farge.

Published in 1930:
As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner. I’ve never read anything by Faulkner. I keep intending to read Faulkner, but the books seem so intimidating—and dark.
The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett. Good book. Good movie.
The Secret of the Old Clock by Carolyn Keene. The first of the Nancy Drew series.
The Little Engine That Could by Watty Piper. Classic picture book.
Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome.
Strong Poison by Dorothy Sayers. The beginning of the romance between novelist Harriet Vane and detective and man-about-town Lord Peter Wimsey. the development of the relationship between Miss Vane and Lord Peter is about my favorite in all of literature. It begins with Lord Peter trying to find evidence that will clear Harriet Vane of the charge of murder.
Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh. A novel “satirising the Bright Young People: decadent young London society between World War I and World War II.” It sounds like something I would like to read someday.