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Third of 12 posts with an illustrated decade-by-decade timeline for the years 1900 to 2021. For more on the timeline and a link to the book on Amazon, see here. This post is available as a video at https://youtu.be/xdvLaUe2Ms4.

1930-1939

This post is a teaser, not the full text for 1930-1939.

Among the events of this decade:

• 1932-1933 Great Famine (Holodomor) in the Ukraine, USSR, with somewhere between 1.5 and 5 million deaths. Followed in 1936-1938 by Stalin’s Great Purge, during which some 700,000 of his countrymen are killed on his orders, and all record of them deleted from history.
• 1933 Hitler is elected to national office, becoming German chancellor and Fuehrer.
• 1933 In “The Means to Prosperity,” John Maynard Keynes advocates that during recessions or depressions, the government should borrow to prop up businesses and production, repaying the loans during times of prosperity. The justification for massive deficit spending.
• 1933 Tennessee Valley Authority is created by Congress to supply power via hydroelectric dams (displacing some 125,000 residents) and to aid development in a region hard-hit by the Great Depression.

• 1935 US legislation under FDR: National Labor Relations Act guarantees right to organize unions and to strike. Minimum wage law. Social Security Act sets benefits for retirement, disability, unemployment, and dependent mothers and children.
• 1936-1939 In the Spanish Civil War, Francisco Franco and the fascist Falange, backed by Germany and Italy, defeat a left-wing faction backed by USSR and Communist sympathizers. An incident in the war inspires Picasso’s Guernica, 1937.
• Communications: most American homes have at least one radio.
• Best-selling books include Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, 1930, and J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, 1937. Cutting-edge: Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, 1932 (dystopian future with social hierarchy based on intelligence) and Ayn Rand, We the Living, 1936 (one of the earliest anti-Communist novels).

• Architecture: the Empire State Building, 1931, world’s tallest until 1970; and the Golden Gate Bridge, 1937, the longest and tallest in the world at the time.
• Top-grossing films include Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much, 1934, and Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, 1937, the first feature-length animated film.
• Music: Cab Calloway’s “Minnie the Moocher,” 1931 (“hi de hi de hi de ho”), Irving Berlin’s “Cheek to Cheek” (danced by Rogers and Astaire in Top Hat), and Judy Garland’s “Over the Rainbow,” 1939 (from The Wizard of Oz).

Feedback I’d appreciate from you on the PDF of 1930-1939

• Have I listed all the most significant events for this decade? Space is limited and there’s room for disagreement, but do tell me if you think anything important is missing. In case you want to add events important to you, I’ve allowed some blank space on every set of facing pages.
• I have not read all the books I mention nor listened to all the musical styles. Are any of the facts or descriptions wrong? Corrections welcome.
• I’d like to include major events in areas such as education, psychology, Supreme Court decisions, and sports. If you can boil down those or similar fields to a half-dozen significant events from 1900 to 2021, send them to me and I’ll try to work them in.
• Of course, point out typos, bad grammar, messy syntax, and so on.

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