Timeline and Contexts
1930: New York City population approaches 7 million
- Chrysler Building completed
- Fortune magazine launched by Henry Luce
- Snickers launched by Mars
- The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett
1931: Empire State Building completed
- Cab Calloway’s orchestra replaces Duke Ellington’s at the Cotton Club
- Ziegfield Follies closes
- Al Capone indicted
- Pair-o-Dice, the first Las Vegas casino, opens for business
1932: New York’s Palace Theater converts to a cinema as Vaudeville dies
- “Room in New York” by Edward Hopper
- “Buck Rogers in the 25th Century” debuts, the first science fiction program on radio
- Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley
- The Dow Jones reaches its lowest level of the Great Depression, bottoming out at 41.2
1933: Repeal of Volstead Act ends prohibition
- Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers appear in first of ten films.
- Billie Holiday’s recording debut (at age 18, with Benny Goodman)
- United States v. One Book Called Ulysses finds Joyce’s novel is not pornographic
1934: Bonnie & Clyde, John Dillinger and Pretty Boy Floyd all gunned down by law enforcement (in Louisiana, Illinois and Ohio, respectively)
- Chanel #5 advertised actively in New York
- Donald Duck appears in his first film
- New York premier of Anything Goes by Cole Porter
1935: First night game in Major League Baseball
- Penguin publishes first paperback (Andre Maurois’s Ariel)
- United Auto Workers (UAW) forms and immediately organizes strikes
- Monopoly introduced by Parker Brothers
- Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner
1936: The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money by John Maynard Keynes
- First washateria in the US
- Polarized sunglasses and sunblock first marketed
- “Modern Times” with Charlie Chaplin
- Spanish Civil War begins
1937: The Hobbit by J.R.R Tolkien
- Joe Louis becomes heavy weight champion
- The zipper gains ascendancy over the button in men’s pants as Lana Turner popularizes “the sweater girl” look
- Minetta Tavern opens on MacDougal Street
1938: German annexation of Austria (the Anschluss)
- Benny Goodman’s Carnegie Hall concert
- Superman introduced in Action Comics #1 (followed by Batman a year later)
- British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain confirms “Peace for our time”
- Nausea by Jean Paul Sartre
1939: Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
- First commercial transatlantic flight (by Pan Am)
- Blue Note records established as Charlie Parker settles in NY
- “The Wizard of Oz” starring Judy Garland
- Einstein-Szilard letter alerting Roosevelt that Germans are working on an atom bomb