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Key: Politics and Society, Science and Technology, Arts and Culture, World

Year in Review

 

Politics & Society
  • Congress passes Adjusted Compensation Act for immediate redemption of WWI bonus certificates.
  • New Jersey mother Mabel Eaton loses custody of her children due to her affiliation with the Communist Party.
  • Second Neutrality Act passed, adds prohibition of granting US loans to belligerents
  • Soil Conservation and Domestic Allotment Act replaces Agricultural Adjustment Act
  • Socialist Party nominates Norman Thomas, Pres. Candidate
  • Eleanor Roosevelt hosts White House garden party for black female students of Washington's National Industrial School. School principal praises Roosevelt while Southern newspapers denounce her
  • Republicans nominate Alfred M. Landon & Frank Knox; Democrats nominate FDR & John Nance
  • Robinson-Patman Act prohibits price-lowering and monopolies
  • US Act passed granting Virgin Islands right to elect its own legislature
  • Mary McLeod Bethune named director of Negro affairs in the National Youth Administration. She is the first black woman to receive a major federal appointment
  • Walsh-Healet Public Contracts Act sets minimum wages, 8 hr days, 40 hr weeks, no child labor for companies with gov. contracts
1936 Miscellaneous
Educator Robert M. Hutchins publishes The Higher Learning in America
Gross national debt is $34 billion; gov. expenditures rise for relief programs
T. S. Eliot begins Four Quartets, finishes 1942
 Electric guitars gain increasing popularity
38% of US families have annual incomes of less than $1000; poverty line is $1330 BBC broadcasts 1st world TV service with 3 hrs/day programming
 Riefenstahl directs Nazi films Triumph of the Will and Olympia
General Mills introduces fictional "Betty Crocker"
  • San Francisco transbay bridge completed linking SF and Oakland
  • Luce publishes Life, weekly photographic news and feature magazine
  • United Auto Workers begin sit-down strike at GM plant in Flint, Michigan; ends Feb 1937
Science and Technology
and
tech
  • The first building to be completely covered in glass is completed in Toledo, Ohio, for the Owens-Illinois Glass Company.
Science and Technology Advances
Elec. engineer George H. Brown invents turnstile antenna, a standard for TV & fm broadcasting
 US Weather Bureau begins showing fronts & isolines on weather maps
Carl Anderson wins Nobel Prize in Physics for discovering the positron
Health Advances
Tampax, Inc. founded in New Brunswick, NJ; produces first commercial tampon
  • Generators at Hoover Dam begin to transmit electricity from the Colorado River 266 miles to Los Angeles, California.
1936
 January 1936 February 1936 March 1936 April 1936 May 1936 June 1936 July 1936 August 1936 September 1936 October 1936 November 1936 December 1936
Arts and Culture
  • Baseball Hall of Fame is established at Cooperstown, NY
  • The Green Hornet radio show debuts
  • Billboard magazine publishes its first music hit parade
  •   The 30s Jukebox
  • Orson Welles directs all black cast in Macbeth for Negro People's Theatre, part of the Federal Theatre Project
  • Robert Frost's A Further Range, Robert E. Sherwood's Idiot's Delight, and Harold L. Davis' Honey in the Horn by Harold L. Davis win Pulitzer Prizes
  • The March of Time: Father Divine runs for President
  • Margaret Mitchell publishes her only book, Gone With the Wind
Songs released in 1936
Books released in 1936
  • Gone With the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
  • It Can't Happen Here, Sinclair Lewis
  • Double Indemnity, James M. Cain
  • The Big Money, John Dos Passos
  • Drums Along the Mowhawk, Walter D. Edmonds
  • Eyeless in Gaza, Aldous Huxley
  • In Dubious Battle, John Steinbeck
  • Absalom, Absalom, William Faulkner
  • How to Win Friends and Influence People, Dale Carnegie
  • The Joy of Cooking, Irma Rombauer
  • My Life in Spats, P. G. Wodehouse
  • The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, John Maynard Keynes
  • Rose Coyle of Pennsylvania wins Miss America pageant
Films Released in 1936
  • Mr. Deeds Goes to Town
  • My Man Godfrey
  • Dodsworth
  • The Story of Louis Pasteur
  • The Oregon Trail
World
  • The 1936 Winter Olympic Games opens in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany.
  • Germany denounces the Treat of Lacarno and reoccupied the Rhineland
  • US signs treaty with Panama enlarging Panama's authority in Canal Zone
  • Ethiopia falls to Italian Army. Haile Selassie flees
  • The airship Hindenburg arrives at Lakehurst, N.J., the first scheduled transatlantic dirigible flight
  • Spanish Civil War begins when insurgents led by General Francisco Franco revolt against Spain's weak government in Madrid.
  • US announces it will not interfere in Spanish Civil War
  • Summer Olympics, Berlin, American Jesse Owens wins fours gold medals in track and field
  • Hitler and Mussolini sign the Rome-Berlin axis accord