General Historical Events
January
*The National Committee for Modification of the Volstead Act was formed to work for the repeal of Prohibition in the United States.
January 2
*South Dakota native Ernest Lawrence invented the cyclotron, used to accelerate particles to study nuclear physics.
January 3
*Albert Einstein began doing research at the California Institute of Technology, along with astronomer Edwin Hubble.
January 4
*German pilot Elly Beinhorn began her flight to Africa.
January 6
*Thomas Edison submitted his last patent application.
January 22
*Sir Isaac Isaacs was sworn in as the first Australian-born Governor-General of Australia.
January 25
*Mohandas Gandhi was again released from imprisonment in India.
January 27
*Pierre Laval formed a government in France.
January 30
*The movie City Lights starring Charlie Chaplin was released.
February 3
*There was an earthquake at Hawke's Bay (New Zealand). Much of the New Zealand cities of Napier and Hastings were destroyed in an earthquake measuring 7.9 on the Richter scale killing 256 people.
February 4
*Soviet leader Joseph Stalin gave a speech calling for rapid industrialization, arguing that only strong industrialized countries will win wars while "weak" nations are "beaten". Stalin states: "We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this distance in ten years. Either we do it, or they will crush us." Intensification of the First Five Year Plan in the Soviet Union for industrialization and collectivization of agriculture.
February 10
*Official inauguration ceremonies for New Delhi as the capital of India began.
February 11
*National Socialist (NSDAP) and National Party (DNVP) members walked out of the German Reichstag in protest against changes in the parliament's protocol intended to limit heckling.
February 12
*Vatican Radio aired its first broadcasts.
February 14
*The original film version of Dracula with Bela Lugosi was released in the United States.
February 16
*Pehr Evind Svinhufvud was elected president of Finland.
February 20
*California received the go-ahead by the United States Congress to build the San Francisco - Oakland Bay Bridge.
February 21
*Peruvian revolutionaries hijacked a Ford Trimotor aeroplane and demanded that the pilot drop propaganda leaflets over Lima.
March 1
*The USS Arizona was placed back in full commission after a refit.
*Oswald Mosley founded the New Party as a breakaway from the Labour Party in the United Kingdom.
March 3
*The Star-Spangled Banner was adopted as the United States' National Anthem.
March 5
*The British viceroy of India and Mohandas Gandhi signed the Gandhi-Irwi Pact.
March 7
*The new House of Representatives opened in Helsinki, Finland.
March 11
*The Ready for Labour and Defence of the USSR program, abbreviated as GTO, was introduced in the Soviet Union.
March 17
*Nevada legalized gambling.
March 19
*Westminster St. George's by-election in the Uited Kingdom resulted in the victory of the Conservative candidate Duff Cooper. The by-election had been treated virtually as a referendum on the leadership of the Conservative leader Stanley Baldwin and Duff Cooper's victory ended the campaign by the press barons Lord Beaverbrook and Viscount Rothemere to oust Baldwin.
March 23
*Indian revolutionary leaders Bhagat Singh, Shivaram Raiguru and Sukhdev Thapar were hanged for conspiracy to murder in the British Raj.
March 25
*The Scottsboro Boys were arrested in Alabama and charged with rape.
March 27
*English writer Arnold Bennett died of typhoid in London shortly after returning from a visit to Paris, where he drank local water to prove it was safe.
March 31
*An earthquake destroyed Managua, Nicaragua, killing 2,000 people.
April 1
*The Second Encirclement Campaign against Jiangxi Soviet in China was launched by the Kuomintang government to destroy the Communist forces in Jiangxi province.
April 6
*The Portuguese government declared martial law in Madeira and in the Azores because of an attempted military takeover in Funchal.
April 9
*The Argentinian anarchist Severino Digiovanni was executed.
April 12
*Municipal elections in Spain, which were treated as a virtual referendum on the monarchy, resulted in the triumph for the republican parties.
April 14
*The Second Spanish Republic was proclaimed in Madrid. Meanwhile, as a result of the victory of the Republican Left of Catalonia, Francesc Macia proclaimed in Barcelona the Catalan Republic.
Alfonso XIII, the King of Spain, departed from the country after reigning for forty-five years. Forces favoring a republic won big in the municipal elections. The king was declared guilty of high treason on November 12 and forbidden to return to the country. The royal property was confiscated and a new constitution was adopted December 9. Spain created a republic that would continue until 1939.
April 15
*The Castellammarese War ended with the assassination of Joe "The Boss" Masseria, briefly leaving Salvatore Maranzano as capo di tutti i capi ("boss of all bosses") and undisputed ruler of the American Mafia. Maranzano was himself assassinated less than 6 months later, leading to the establishment of the Five Families.
April 17
*After the negotiations between the republican ministers of Spain and Catalonia, the Catalan Republic became a Catalan autonomous government inside the Spanish Republic called Generalitat de Catalunya.
April 22
*Austria, Britain, Denmark, Germany, Italy, Sweden and the United States recognized the Spanish Republic.
April 25
*The automobile manufacturer Porsche was founded by Ferdinand Porsche in Stuttgart.
April 30
*Chinese rebels led by General Chen Jitang broke with General Chiang Kai-shek and took control of Guangzhou (Canton).
May 1
*Construction of the Empire State Building was completed in New York City.
May 4
*Kemal Ataturk was re-elected president of Turkey.
May 5
*Ismet Inonu formed a new government in Turkey (7th government).
May 11
*The Creditanstalt, Austria's largest bank, went bankrupt, beginning the banking collapse in Central Europe that caused a worldwide financial meltdown.
May 13
* Paul Doumer was elected president of France.
May 14
*Adalen shootings: Five people were killed in Adalen, Sweden, when soldiers opened fire on an unarmed trade union demonstration.
May 15
*The Chinese Communists inflicted a sharp defeat on the Kuomintang forces.
*Pope Pius XI issued the encyclical Quadragesimo anno on the "reconstruction of the social order".
May 31
*The Second Encirclement Campaign against Jiangxi Soviet ended in the defeat of the Kuomintang.
June
*France elected Paul Domer president to succeed Gaston Domergue.
June 3
*Salvador Dali's The Persistence of Memory was put on display for the first time in Paris at the Galerie Pierre Colle.
June 5
*German Chancellor Dr. Heinrich Bruning visited London, where he warned the British Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald that the collapse of the Austrian banking system, caused by the bankruptcy of the Creditanstalt, had left the entire German banking system on the verge of collapse.
June 12
*English cricketer Charlie Parker equalled J. T. Hearne's record for the earliest date to reach 100 wickets.
June 14
*The overloaded pleasure craft Saint-Philibert, carrying vacationers home to Nantes from the Île de Noirmoutier, sank at the mouth of the river Loire in France; over 450 drowned.
June 17
*British authorities in China arrested Vietnamese Communist leader Ho Chi Minh (Nguyen That Than).
June 19
*In an attempt to stop the banking crisis in Central Europe from causing a worldwide financial meltdown, United States President Herbert Hoover issued the Hoover Moratorium.
*The Geneva Convention (1929) relative to the treatment of prisoners of war came into force.
June 23 - July 1
*Wiley Post and Harold Gatty accomplished the first round-the-world flight in a single-engine plane, flying east from Roosevelt Field, New York, in 8 days, 15 hours, 51 minutes.
July
*John Haven Emerson of Cambridge, Massachusetts perfected his negative pressure ventilator ("iron lung") just in time for the growing polio epidemic.
July 1
*The rebuilt Milano Centrale railway station offically opened in Italy.
July 9
*Irish racing driver Kaye Don broke the world water speed record at Lake Garda, Italy.
July 13
*Royal soldiers shot and killed 22 people demonstrating against the Maharaja Hari Singh of the Indian princely state of Kashmir and Jammu.
*The German Danatbank went bankrupt, precipitating a general closure on banks in Germany for almost a month.
July 16
*Emperor Haile Selassie signed the first constitution of Ethiopia.
July 26
*The millennialist Bible Student movement adopted the name Jehovah's Witnesses at a meeting in Columbus, Ohio.
July 31
*The May Report in the United Kingdom recommended extensive cuts to government expenditure. This produced a political crisis as many members of the Labour Party (at this time in government) objected to the proposals.
August
*The 1931 China floods reached their peak in possibly the deadliest natural disaster yet recorded.
*Warner Brothers released the first Merrie Melodies cartoon, Lady, Play Your Mandolin.
August 3
*The Yangtze River in China burst a dam during heavy cyclonic rainfall, flooding 104,000 square kilometers (40,000 square miles) of farmland and causing widespread famine.
*Chiang Kai-shek came under increasing pressure from the Communists led by the 37-year-old Mao Tse Tung. Chiang became preoccupied with dealing with the Communists and the Yangtze River floods to the extent that he was not able to effectively deal with the threat posed by the Japanese.
August 9
*The referendum in Prussia for dissolving the Landtag ended with the "yes" side winning 37% of the vote, which was insufficient for calling the early elections. The elections were intended to remove the Social Democratic Party (SPD) government of Otto Braun, which was one of the strongest forces for democracy in Germany. Supporting the "yes" side were the NSDAP, the DNVP and the Communist Party (KPD) while supporting the "no" side were the SPD and Zentrum.
August 11
*A run on the British pound led to political and economic crisis in Britain.
August 24
*The Labour Government of Ramsay MacDonald resigned in Britain. It was replaced by a National Government of people drawn from all parties, also under MacDonald.
Britain's Labour government resigned in a disagreement over remedies for the nation's financial crisis, but Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald headed a new coalition cabinet that would retain power until mid-1935.
September 5
*John Thomson, Scottish football (soccer) player, died as the result of an accident during a Celtic-Rangers match.
September 7
*The Second Round Table Conference on the constitutional future of India opened in London. Mahatma Gandhi represented the Indian National Congress.
September 10
*The worst hurricane in British Honduras history killed an estimated 1,500.
September 15
*In what was referred to as the Invergordon Mutiny, strikes were called in the British Royal Navy due to decreased pay.
September 16
*The hanging of resistance leader Omar Mukhtar occurred in Italian Libya.
September 18
*The Japanese military staged the Mukden Incident as a pretext for the Japanese invasion of Manchuria.
*Geli Raubal committed suicide in her uncle Adolf Hitler's apartment.
September 19
*On a pretext, the Japanese occupied Manchuria. They were angry at China's boycott of Japanese textiles.
Japanese militarists used the Mukden Incident as an excuse to occupy Manchuria. They cited an alleged railway explosion as provocation, seized Kirin on September 21 and within five months would have taken Harbin and the three eastern provinces (the action was in large measure a reprisal for China's boycott of Japan's cotton textiles.
September 20
*With a gun literally pointed to his head the Chinese commander of Kirin province announced the annexation of that territory to Japan.
September 21
*The Japanese seized Kirin. By early 1932, they would control the three eastern provinces of China.
September 22
*The United Kingdom abandoned the gold standard.
October
*The Caltech Department of Physics faculty and graduate students met with their distinguished guest, Albert Einstein.
October 4
*Dick Tracy, the comic strip detective character created by cartoonist Chester Gould, made his debut appearance in the Detroit Mirror newspaper.
October 5
*American aviators Clyde Edward Pangborn and Hugh Herndon, Jr., completed the first non-stop flight across the Pacific Ocean, from Misawa, Japan, to East Wenatchee, Washington, in 41.5 hours.
October 11
*A rally in Bad Harzburg, Germany led to the Harzburg Front being founded, uniting the NSDAP, the DNVP, the Stahlhelm and various other right-wing fractions.
October 17
*American gangster Al Capone was sentenced to 11 years in prison for tax evasion in Chicago.
*The Leeds Bradford International Airport was opened as Leeds and Bradford Municipal Aerodrome in England.
October 24
*The George Washington Bridge across the Hudson River in the United States was dedicated. It opened to traffic the following day. At 3,500 feet (1,100 m), it nearly doubled the previous record for the longest main span in the world.
October 27
*The United Kingdom general election resulted in the victory of the National Government and the defeat of the Labour Party in the country's greatest ever electoral landslide.
November 7
*The Chinese Soviet Republic was proclaimed by Mao Zedong.
November 8
*French police launched a large-scale raid against Corsican bandits.
*The Panama Canal was closed for a couple of weeks due to damage caused by earthquakes.
November 12
*Spain's Alfonso XIII was declared guilty of high treason and was forbidden to return. The royal property was confiscated.
November 21
*The infamous Red-and-White Party, given by Arthur Jeffress in Maud Allan's Regent's Park townhouse in London, marked the end of the "Bright young things" subculture in Britain.
November 25
*Heavy hydrogen, later named deuterium, was discovered by chemist Harold Clayton Urey.
*Ali Fethi Okyar formed a new government in Turkey (third government).
*James Whale's film, Frankenstein, was released in New York.
December 5
*The original Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow (1883) was dynamited by order of Joseph Stalin.
December 8
*Carl Friedrich Goerdeler was appointed Reich Price Commissioner in Germany to enforce the deflationary policies of the Brüning government.
December 9
*In Spain, a new constitution was adopted and created a republic that would continue until 1939.
December 10
*Jane Addams became the first American woman to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
*Niceto Alcala-Zamora was elected president of the Spanish Republic.
December 11
*Japan abandoned the gold standard.
*The Parliament of the United Kingdom enacted the Statute of Westminster, which established 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.
December 13
*Wakatsuki Reijiro resigned as Prime Minister of Japan.
December 26
*Phi Iota Alpha, the oldest existing Latino fraternity, was founded.
Date unknown
*Ust-Abakanskoye became Abakan.
*The population of the United States reached 124 million. Britain has 46 million, Germany 65, France 42, Italy 41, the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia) 61, Soviet Russia 148, India 338 , and China 440.
