This Year in History:
1934
Discover what happened in this year with HISTORY’s summaries of major events, anniversaries, famous births and notable deaths.
On February 5, 1934, Henry Louis Aaron Jr., the baseball slugger who broke Babe Ruth’s legendary record of 714 homers, is born in Mobile, Alabama. Aaron began his professional baseball career in 1952 in the Negro League and joined the Milwaukee Braves of the major league in 1954, eight years after Jackie Robinson had integrated […]
On March 22, 1934, the first Masters golf championship tees off in Augusta, Georgia. The Augusta National Golf Club course presents difficulties for many of the golfers, but Emmet French, Jimmy Hines and Horton Smith finish under par and share the lead after shooting 70, two under par, in the first of four rounds. Smith […]
On May 11, 1934, a massive storm sends millions of tons of topsoil flying from across the parched Great Plains region of the United States as far east as New York, Boston and Atlanta. At the time the Great Plains were settled in the mid-1800s, the land was covered by prairie grass, which held moisture […]
This Day in History – May 11, 1934, was the day of the black blizzard. Dust and dirt storms poured upon the country making it very hard for farmers to keep their crops healthy. To find out more about this day, check out this video.
On May 23, 1934, notorious criminals Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow are shot to death by Texas and Louisiana state police near Sailes, Louisiana. Bonnie Parker met the charismatic Clyde Barrow in Texas when she was 19 years old and her husband (she married when she was 16) was serving time in jail for murder. […]
On May 30, 1934, the Tokyo-based Jidosha-Seizo Kabushiki-Kaisha (Automobile Manufacturing Co., Ltd. in English) takes on a new name: Nissan Motor Company. Jidosha-Seizo Kabushiki-Kaisha had been established in December 1933. The company’s new name, adopted in June 1934, was an abbreviation for Nippon Sangyo, a “zaibatsu”(or holding company) belonging to Tobata’s founder, Yoshisuke Aikawa. Nissan […]
In a major reversal of federal policy toward Native Americans, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signs the Indian Reorganization Act into law on June 18, 1934. Also known as the IRA, the Indian New Deal and the Wheeler-Howard Act, the act granted a new degree of autonomy to Native Americans in the United States, giving them […]
In Germany, Nazi leader Adolf Hitler orders a bloody purge of his own political party, assassinating hundreds of Nazis whom he believed had the potential to become political enemies in the future. The event became known as the Night of the Long Knives. The leadership of the Nazi Storm Troopers (SA), whose four million members […]
Outside Chicago’s Biograph Theatre, notorious criminal John Dillinger—America’s “Public Enemy No. 1″—is killed in a hail of bullets fired by federal agents. In a fiery bank-robbing career that lasted just over a year, Dillinger and his associates robbed 11 banks for more than $300,000, broke jail and narrowly escaped capture multiple times, and killed seven […]
With the death of German President Paul von Hindenburg, Chancellor Adolf Hitler becomes absolute dictator of Germany under the title of Fuhrer, or “Leader.” The German army took an oath of allegiance to its new commander-in-chief, and the last remnants of Germany’s democratic government were dismantled to make way for Hitler’s Third Reich. The Fuhrer […]
A group of federal prisoners classified as “most dangerous” arrives at Alcatraz Island, a 22-acre rocky outcrop situated 1.5 miles offshore in San Francisco Bay, on August 11, 1934. The convicts—the first civilian prisoners to be housed in the new high-security penitentiary—joined a few dozen military prisoners left over from the island’s days as a […]
On August 19, 1934, Adolf Hitler, already chancellor, is also elected president of Germany in an unprecedented consolidation of power in the short history of the republic. In 1932, German President Paul von Hindenburg, old, tired, and a bit senile, had won re-election as president but had lost a considerable portion of his right/conservative support […]
On October 16, 1934, the embattled Chinese Communists break through Nationalist enemy lines and begin an epic flight from their encircled headquarters in southwest China. Known as Ch’ang Cheng—the “Long March”—the retreat lasted 368 days and covered 6,000 miles, more than twice the distance from New York to San Francisco. Civil war in China between […]
Charles “Pretty Boy” Floyd is shot by FBI agents in a cornfield in East Liverpool, Ohio. Floyd, who had been a hotly pursued fugitive for four years, used his last breath to deny his involvement in the infamous Kansas City Massacre, in which four officers were shot to death at a train station. He died […]
On the evening of November 21, 1934, a young and gangly would-be dancer took to the stage of Harlem’s Apollo Theater to participate in a harrowing tradition known as Amateur Night. Finding herself onstage as a result of pure chance after her name was drawn out of a hat, the aspiring dancer spontaneously decided to […]
Sergei Kirov, a leader of the Russian Revolution and a high-ranking member of the Politburo, is shot to death at his Leningrad office by Communist Party member Leonid Nikolayev, likely at the instigation of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. Whatever Stalin’s precise role in the assassination of his political rival Kirov, he used the murder as […]
On December 9, 1934, the New York Giants win the NFL championship by beating the Chicago Bears, 30-13, in the famous “Sneakers Game.” With the temperature at 9 degrees and the Polo Grounds field a sheet of ice, the Giants open the second half wearing basketball shoes and score 27 points in the final quarter […]
