1930's-1950's

By hhallejean

  • The stock market crashes

  • the average American's income drops 40 percent to about $1,500 per year.

  • Adolf Hitler becomes chancellor of Germany

  • the nation repeals the constitutional amendment prohibiting the making, selling, possessing and consuming of alcoholic drinks

  • Labor strife is widespread

  • Italian prime minister and dictator Benito Mussolini invades Ethiopia

  • Japan invades China

  • Hitler marches into Austria

  • Germany invades Poland

  • President Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected to an unprecedented third term.

  • The Germans opened the Auschwitz concentration camp, where at least 1.1 million people would be killed.

  • The Battle of Britain raged with Nazi bombings of military bases and London, known as the Blitz. Britain's Royal Air Force was ultimately victorious in its defense of the U.K.

  • The Nazis began a prolonged military blockade known as the Siege of Leningrad, which would not end until 1944.

  • The U.S. enters the war

  • The naval Battle of Midway occurred, between the U.S. Navy led by Admiral Chester Nimitz and the Imperial Japanese Navy led by Isoroku Yamamoto.

  • German troops and police entered the Warsaw Ghetto to deport its surviving inhabitants. The Jews refused to surrender, and the Germans ordered the burning of the ghetto, which lasted until May 16 and killed an estimated 13,000 people.

  • One month after surrendering to Allied forces, the government of Italy under Pietro Badoglio joined the Allies and declared war on Germany.

  • D-Day, when the Allies landed in Normandy on the way to liberate Europe from the Nazis.​

  • German military officers led by Claus von Stauffenberg led Operation Valkyrie, a plot to kill German chancellor Adolf Hitler inside his Wolf's Lair field headquarters, but failed.

  • President Harry S. Truman ordered the building of the hydrogen bomb, on June 25th, the Korean War began with the invasion of South Korea.

  • the Population Registration Act was enacted in South Africa, requiring that each inhabitant of the country would be classified and registered according to his or her "race."

  • Truman signed the Treaty of San Francisco, a peace treaty with Japan on September 8, officially ending World War II.

  • under the Separate Representation of Voters Act people who were classed as "coloureds" were disenfranchised.

  • Londoners suffered through the Great Smog of 1952, a severe air pollution event that caused deaths from breathing issues numbering in the thousands.

  • Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin died of a cerebral hemorrhage on March 5 in Kutsevo Dacha

  • first atomic submarine was launched in the Thames River in Connecticut, the U.S.S. Nautilus

  • Rosa Parks to give up her seat on the bus to a white man, and the subsequent Montgomery Bus Boycott.

  • Internationally, the world saw the explosion of the Hungarian Revolution on October 23, a revolution against the Soviet-backed Hungarian People's Republic

  • Chinese Leader Mao Tse-tung launched the "Great Leap Forward," a failed five-year economic and social effort that led to millions of deaths and was abandoned by 1961.