This Year in History:
1938
Discover what happened in this year with HISTORY’s summaries of major events, anniversaries, famous births and notable deaths.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, an adult victim of polio, founds the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, which he later renamed the March of Dimes Foundation, on January 3, 1938. A predominantly…
On January 16, 1938, swing jazz music has its high‑brow coming out party at Carnegie Hall, with a concert featuring big band sensation Benny Goodman. Jazz has been called “America’s…
“See for yourself what the genius of Walt Disney has created in his first full length feature production,” proclaimed the original trailer for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, released…
On February 12, 1938, best‑selling author Judy Blume, known for her children’s books and young‑adult novels, including Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing and Are You There God? It’s Me,…
The National Dollar Stores Strike begins in San Francisco’s Chinatown on February 26, 1938. The three‑month strike delivered a win for workers and became the neighborhood’s first major organized labor…
On March 12, 1938, German troops march into Austria to annex the German‑speaking nation for the Third Reich. In early 1938, Austrian Nazis conspired for the second time in four…
Douglas Corrigan, the last of the early glory‑seeking fliers, takes off from Floyd Bennett field in Brooklyn, New York, on a flight that would finally win him a place in…
Without warning, a powerful Category 3 hurricane slams into Long Island and southern New England, causing 600 deaths and devastating coastal cities and towns. Also called the Long Island Express,…
On September 27, 1938, President Franklin Roosevelt writes to German Chancellor Adolf Hitler regarding the threat of war in Europe. The German chancellor had been threatening to invade the Sudetenland…
British and French prime ministers Neville Chamberlain and Edouard Daladier sign the Munich Pact with Nazi leader Adolf Hitler. The agreement averted the outbreak of war but gave Czechoslovakia away…
“The War of the Worlds”—Orson Welles’s realistic radio dramatization of a Martian invasion of Earth—is broadcast on the radio on October 30, 1938. Welles was only 23 years old when…
On November 9, 1938, in an event that would foreshadow the Holocaust, German Nazis launch a campaign of terror against Jewish people and their homes and businesses in Germany and…
On December 16, 1938, Adolf Hitler institutes the Mother’s Cross, to encourage women of “pure” German origin to increase the size of their families and grow the population of the…
On December 28, 1938, the silent‑film star Florence Lawrence dies by suicide in Beverly Hills. She was 52 years old. Though she was best known for her roles in nearly…
