Amelia Earhart announced plans for a solo flight from Hawaii to California, a route no one had flown alone, extending her record-breaking career.

Elvis Aaron Presley was born in a two-room shotgun house in Tupelo, Mississippi, to Vernon and Gladys Presley.

Amelia Earhart became the first person to fly solo from Hawaii to the U.S. mainland, covering 2,408 miles in just under 18 hours.

Explorer Richard Byrd's second Antarctic expedition continued mapping vast unexplored stretches of the continent's interior by aircraft during this period of intensive polar research.

A New Jersey jury found Bruno Richard Hauptmann guilty of murdering the infant son of aviator Charles Lindbergh, in the era's most sensational trial.

DuPont chemist Wallace Carothers successfully synthesized nylon, the first fully synthetic fiber, opening the age of synthetic materials.

Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen submitted their paper on what would later be called 'Einstein-Rosen bridges,' the theoretical foundation for wormholes.

A false rumor that a Puerto Rican teenager had been beaten to death by a white shopkeeper for shoplifting ignited riots across Harlem, exposing deep economic grievances.

A colossal dust storm, one of the worst in American history, swept across the Great Plains, turning day into darkness and burying homes in Oklahoma, Texas, and Kansas.

Communist forces on the Long March seized the strategic Luding Bridge over the Dadu River, a defining feat of endurance and daring.

Bill Wilson took his last drink and, with Dr. Bob Smith's help, laid the foundation in Akron, Ohio for Alcoholics Anonymous, later dated to this day.

Robert Watson-Watt demonstrated that radio waves could detect aircraft, a breakthrough that would become RADAR and help win the Battle of Britain.

Italian forces under Mussolini's orders crossed from Eritrea into Ethiopia without formal declaration of war, opening a brutal colonial campaign.

The Downtown Athletic Club of New York presented the first college football trophy, later renamed the Heisman Trophy, to University of Chicago halfback Jay Berwanger.