1930s

The 1930s (pronounced "nineteen-thirties", commonly abbreviated as the "Thirties") was a decade of the Gregorian calendar that began on January 1, 1930, and ended on December 31, 1939. It was the fourth decade of the 20th century.

"'30s" and "thirties" redirect here. For the decade of this century, see 2030s. For decades comprising years 30–39 of other centuries, see List of decades.
From left, clockwise: Dorothea Lange's photo of the homeless Florence Thompson show the effects of the Great Depression; Due to the extreme drought conditions, the farms become dry and the Dust Bowl spreads through America; The Canton Operation during the Second Sino-Japanese War; Aviator Amelia Earhart becomes an American flight icon; German dictator Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party attempt to establish a New Order of absolute Nazi German hegemony in Europe, which culminates in 1939 when Germany invades Poland, leading to the outbreak of World War II; The Hindenburg explodes over a small New Jersey airfield, causing 36 deaths and effectively ending commercial airship travel; Mohandas Gandhi walks to the Arabian Sea in the protest Salt March of 1930.
Millennium: 2nd millennium
Centuries:
Decades:
Years:
Categories:
  • Births
  • Deaths
  • By country
  • By topic
  • Establishments
  • Disestablishments

The decade was defined by a global economic and political crisis that culminated in the Second World War. It saw the international financial system collapse, beginning with the Wall Street Crash of 1929, the largest stock market crash in American history, and an economic downfall called the Great Depression that had a traumatic effect worldwide, leading to widespread unemployment and poverty, especially in the United States, an economic superpower, and Germany, who had to deal with the reparations regarding World War I. The Dust Bowl (which gives the nickname the Dirty Thirties) in the United States further emphasised the scarcity of wealth. Herbert Hoover worsened the situation with his failed attempt to balance the budget by taxes. Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected, as a response, in 1933, and introduced the New Deal. The founding of the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) and the funding of numerous projects (e.g. the Hoover Dam) helped restore prosperity in the US.

The decade also saw the rapid retreat of Liberal democracy, as authoritarian regimes emerged in countries across Europe and South America, in particular the Third Reich in Germany. Germany elected Adolf Hitler, who imposed the Nuremberg Laws, a series of laws which discriminated against Jews and other ethnic minorities. Weaker states such as Ethiopia, China, and Poland were invaded by expansionist world powers, the last of these attacks leading to the outbreak of World War II on September 1, 1939, despite calls from the League of Nations for worldwide peace. World War II helped end the Great Depression when governments spent money for the war effort. The 1930s also saw a proliferation of new technologies, especially in the fields of intercontinental aviation, radio, and film.

Politics and wars

Wars
The outbreak of World War II: Until the beginning of October 1939 both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union conquer Poland entirely in accordance with the secret part of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact

Internal conflicts

Germany - Rise of Nazism
German dictator Adolf Hitler (right) and Italian dictator Benito Mussolini (left) pursue agendas of territorial expansion for their countries in the 1930s, eventually leading to the outbreak of World War II in 1939
  • In 1939, several countries of the Americas, including Canada, Cuba, and the United States, controversially deny asylum to hundreds of German Jewish refugees on board the MS St. Louis who are fleeing the Nazi regime's racist agenda of anti-Semitic persecution in Germany. In the end, no country accepts the refugees, and the ship returns to Germany with most of its passengers on board. Some commit suicide, rather than return to Nazi Germany.

United States - Combating the depression
New Deal: President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs the Tennessee Valley Authority Act, May 18, 1933
  • Franklin D. Roosevelt is elected President of the United States in November 1932. Roosevelt initiates a widespread social welfare strategy called the "New Deal" to combat the economic and social devastation of the Great Depression. The economic agenda of the "New Deal" was a radical departure from previous laissez-faire economics.

Saudi Arabia - Founding

Spain - Turmoil and Civil War

Colonization

Decolonization and independence

Prominent political events

Europe
Soviet famine of 1932–33. Starved peasants in the streets of Kharkiv, 1933

Africa

Hertzog of South Africa, whose National Party had won the 1929 election alone, after splitting with the Labour Party, received much of the blame for the devastating economic impact of the depression.

America

Asia
Mohandas Gandhi on the Salt March in 1930

Australia

Disasters
The German dirigible airship Hindenburg exploding in 1937
The Dust Bowl dust storm approaches Stratford, Texas, in 1935
  • The 1935 Labor Day Hurricane makes landfall in the Florida Keys as a category 5 hurricane; it was the most intense hurricane to ever make landfall in the Atlantic basin. It caused an estimated $6 million (1935 USD) in damages, and killed around 408 people. The hurricane's strong winds and storm surge destroyed nearly all of the structures between Tavernier and Marathon, and the town of Islamorada was obliterated.
  • The German dirigible airship Hindenburg explodes in the sky above Lakehurst, New Jersey, United States on May 6, 1937. 36 people are killed. The event leads to an investigation of the explosion and the disaster causes major public distrust of the use of hydrogen-inflated airships and seriously damages the reputation of the Zeppelin company.
  • The New London School in New London, Texas, is destroyed by an explosion, killing in excess of 300 students and teachers (1937).
  • The New England Hurricane of 1938, which became a Category 5 hurricane before making landfall as a Category 3. The hurricane was estimated to have caused property losses estimated at US$306 million ($4.72 billion in 2010), killed between 682 and 800 people, and damaged or destroyed over 57,000 homes, including famed actress Katharine Hepburn's, who had been staying in her family's Old Saybrook, Connecticut, beach home when the hurricane struck.
  • The Dust Bowl, or Dirty Thirties: a period of severe dust storms causing major ecological and agricultural damage to American and Canadian prairie lands from 1930 to 1936 (in some areas until 1940). Caused by extreme drought, coupled with decades of extensive farming without crop rotation, fallow fields, cover crops, or other techniques to prevent erosion, and heavy winds, it affected an estimated 100,000,000 acres (400,000 km2) of land (traveling as far east as New York and the Atlantic Ocean), caused mass migration (which was the inspiration for the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck), food shortages, multiple deaths and illness from sand inhalation (see History in Motion), and a severe reduction in the going wage rate.
  • The 1938 Yellow River flood pours out from Huayuankou, China in 1938, inundating 54,000 km2 (21,000 sq mi) of land, and takes an estimated 500,000 lives.

Assassinations and attempts

Prominent assassinations, targeted killings, and assassination attempts include:

Alexander I of Yugoslavia

Economics
In the United States the significantly high unemployment rate lead many unemployed people to use freight trains in order to seek employment in various cities across the country

Science and technology

Technology

Many technological advances occurred in the 1930s, including:

Science
The discovery of the dwarf planet Pluto
  • Clyde Tombaugh identifies Pluto in 1930, which goes on to be announced as the ninth planet in the solar system.

Literature and art

Film
Main article: 1930s in film

In the art of film making, the Golden Age of Hollywood entered a whole decade, after the advent of talking pictures ("talkies") in 1927 and full-color films in 1930: more than 50 classic films were made in the 1930s: most notable were Gone With The Wind and The Wizard of Oz.

In 1930, Howard Hughes produces Hell's Angels (film), the first movie blockbuster to be produced outside of a professional studio, independently, as well as becoming the most expensive movie made, at that time, costing roughly 4 million dollars, and taking four years to make. Hell's Angels was an epic masterpiece, valued, and relative to the people at those specific times, of harsh war.

Radio
On October 30, 1938 Orson Welles' radio adaptation of The War of the Worlds is broadcast, causing panic in various parts of the United States
  • Radio becomes dominant mass media in industrial nations, serving as a way for citizens to listen to music and get news- providing rapid reporting on current events.
  • October 30, 1938 - Orson Welles' radio adaptation of The War of the Worlds is broadcast, causing panic in various parts of the United States.

Music
Main article: 1930s in music

Fashion
Main article: 1930–45 in fashion

The most characteristic North American fashion trend from the 1930s to 1945 was attention at the shoulder, with butterfly sleeves and banjo sleeves, and exaggerated shoulder pads for both men and women by the 1940s. The period also saw the first widespread use of man-made fibers, especially rayon for dresses and viscose for linings and lingerie, and synthetic nylon stockings. The zipper became widely used. These essentially U.S. developments were echoed, in varying degrees, in Britain and Europe. Suntans (called at the time "sunburns") became fashionable in the early 1930s, along with travel to the resorts along the Mediterranean, in the Bahamas, and on the east coast of Florida where one can acquire a tan, leading to new categories of clothes: white dinner jackets for men and beach pajamas, halter tops, and bare midriffs for women.[13]

Revolutionary designer and couturier Madeleine Vionnet gained popularity for her bias-cut technique, which clung, draped, and embraced the curves of the natural female body.

Fashion trendsetters in the period included The Prince of Wales (King Edward VIII from January 1936 until his abdication that December) and his companion Wallis Simpson (the Duke and Duchess of Windsor from their marriage in June 1937), socialites like Nicolas de Gunzburg, Daisy Fellowes and Mona von Bismarck and such Hollywood movie stars as Fred Astaire, Carole Lombard and Joan Crawford.

  • Typical fashions in the 1930s
  • Typical fashions in the 1930s
  • Typical fashions in the 1930s
  • Typical fashions in the 1930s

Architecture
The Empire State Building became the world's tallest building when completed in 1931

Visual arts
See also: Social Realism and History of painting

Social Realism became an important art movement during the Great Depression in the United States in the 1930s. Social realism generally portrayed imagery with socio-political meaning. Other related American artistic movements of the 1930s were American scene painting and Regionalism which were generally depictions of rural America, and historical images drawn from American history. Precisionism with its depictions of industrial America was also a popular art movement during the 1930s in the USA. During the Great Depression the art of photography played an important role in the Social Realist movement. The work of Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, Margaret Bourke-White, Lewis Hine, Edward Steichen, Gordon Parks, Arthur Rothstein, Marion Post Wolcott, Doris Ulmann, Berenice Abbott, Aaron Siskind, Russell Lee, Ben Shahn (as a photographer) among several others were particularly influential.

The Works Progress Administration part of the Roosevelt Administration's New Deal sponsored the Federal Art Project, the Public Works of Art Project, and the Section of Painting and Sculpture which employed many American artists and helped them to make a living during the Great Depression.

Mexican muralism was a Mexican art movement that took place primarily in the 1930s. The movement stands out historically because of its political undertones, the majority of which of a Marxist nature, or related to a social and political situation of post-revolutionary Mexico. Also in Latin America Symbolism and Magic Realism were important movements.

In Europe during the 1930s and the Great Depression, Surrealism, late Cubism, the Bauhaus, De Stijl, Dada, German Expressionism, Symbolist and modernist painting in various guises characterized the art scene in Paris and elsewhere.

.

People

World leaders
1930 – 1931 – 1932 – 1933 – 1934 – 1935 – 1936 – 1937 – 1938 – 1939

Actors / Entertainers

Filmmakers
Walt Disney introduces each of the Seven Dwarfs in a scene from the original 1937 Snow White

Musicians

Painters and sculptors

Photography

Sports figures
Joe Louis American world heavyweight boxing champion.
Joe DiMaggio, center fielder for the New York Yankees

Global

United States

See also: History of baseball in the United States

Criminals
Al Capone

Prominent criminals of the Great Depression:

See also

Timeline

The following articles contain brief timelines which list the most prominent events of the decade:

1930 • 1931 • 1932 • 1933 • 1934 • 1935 • 1936 • 1937 • 1938 • 1939

References
  1. Bix, Herbert P. (1992). "The Showa Emperor's 'Monologue' and the Problem of War Responsibility". Journal of Japanese Studies. 18 (2): 295–363. doi:10.2307/132824. JSTOR 132824.
  2. Hunt, Lynn. "The Making of the West: Peoples and Cultures" Vol. C since 1740.Bedford/St. Martin's, 2009.
  3. Zabecki, David T. (1999). World War II in Europe: an encyclopedia. New York: Garland Pub. p. 1353. ISBN 0-8240-7029-1. Archived from the original on 22 December 2016. Retrieved 12 January 2011.
  4. "Manchukuo " Archived 2007-12-21 at the Wayback Machine Encyclopædia Britannica
  5. A. L. Unger (January 1969). "Stalin's Renewal of the Leading Stratum: A Note on the Great Purge". Soviet Studies. 20 (3): 321–330. doi:10.1080/09668136808410659. JSTOR 149486.
  6. "The first central committee of IMRO. Memoirs of d-r Hristo Tatarchev", Materials for the Macedonian liberation movement, book IX (series of the Macedonian scientific institute of IMRO, led by Bulgarian academician prof. Lyubomir Miletich), Sofia, 1928, p. 102, поредица "Материяли за историята на македонското освободително движение" на Македонския научен институт на ВМРО, воден от българския академик проф. Любомир Милетич, книга IX, София, 1928.
  7. "Inflation and CPI Consumer Price Index 1930-1939". Archived from the original on 2014-05-04.
  8. "White Chocolate Made Of". www.thenibble.com. Archived from the original on 24 February 2011. Retrieved 2 May 2018.
  9. "Howard R. Hughes, Jr.--The Record Setter". www.centennialofflight.net. Archived from the original on 2017-06-30. Retrieved 2017-12-24.
  10. Del Barco, Mandalit. Revolutionary Mural To Return To L.A. After 80 Years. Archived 2018-05-02 at the Wayback Machine npr. October 26, 2010. Retrieved June 19, 2015.
  11. Rondeau, Ginette La América Tropical Archived 2014-10-07 at the Wayback Machine Olvera Street Website Accessed 14 November 2014
  12. Robert Johnson Biography Archived 2011-03-24 at the Wayback Machine. Allmusic
  13. Wilcox, R. Turner: The Mode in Fashion, 1942; rev. 1958, pp. 328–36, 379–84

Further reading
  • Brendon, Piers. The Dark Valley: A Panorama of the 1930s (2000) global political history; 816pp excerpt
  • Cornelissen, Christoph, and Arndt Weinrich, eds. Writing the Great War - The Historiography of World War I from 1918 to the Present (2020) free download; full coverage for major countries.
  • Gardiner, Juliet, The Thirties: An Intimate History. London, Harper Press, 2010. ISBN 978-0-00-724076-0 on Britain
  • Garraty, John A. The Great Depression: An Inquiry into the Causes, Course, and Consequences of the Worldwide Depression of the Nineteen-Thirties, As Seen by Contemporaries (1986).
  • Grenville, J.A.S. A History of the World in the Twentieth Century (Harvard UP, 1994) pp 160–251.
  • Grossman, Mark. Encyclopedia of the Interwar Years: From 1919 to 1939 (2000). 400pp. worldwide coverage
  • Lewis, Thomas Tandy, ed. The Thirties in America. 3 volumes. Pasadena: Salem Press, 2011.
  • Watt D.C. et al., A History of the World in the Twentieth Century (1968) pp 423–463.
  • The Dirty Thirties – Images of the Great Depression in Canada
  • America in the 1930s Extensive library of projects on America in the Great Depression from American Studies at the University of Virginia
  • The 1930s Timeline year by year timeline of events in science and technology, politics and society, culture and international events with embedded audio and video. AS@UVA
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.