Conductor Arturo Toscanini led an internationally broadcast NBC Symphony Orchestra concert, part of a series that brought classical music to millions of American radio listeners.

Adolf Hitler signed the directive for German troops to march into Austria, setting the Anschluss into motion within days.

Amid escalating Axis expansionism, tensions over the fate of small nations intensified as diplomatic warnings went largely unheeded across Europe.

Joe Louis demolished Max Schmeling in two minutes and four seconds at Yankee Stadium, a bout freighted with Nazi propaganda and American pride.

Japanese Imperial Army forces attacked Soviet positions near Lake Khasan on the Manchurian-Korean-Russian border, opening a bloody border war.

Adolf Hitler delivered an incendiary speech at the Nuremberg rally demanding self-determination for Sudeten Germans, escalating the Czechoslovak crisis toward war.

Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard formally began Hewlett-Packard in a Palo Alto garage, a founding moment now revered as the birthplace of Silicon Valley.

Britain, France, Germany, and Italy sign the Munich Agreement, ceding Czechoslovakia's Sudetenland to Hitler without Czech consent.

Lockheed's twin-engine XP-38 prototype fighter made its first flight, previewing an aircraft that would become one of America's most feared World War II warplanes.

Orson Welles's radio dramatization of an alien invasion, staged as fake news bulletins, sent ripples of panic across parts of the United States.

Days before the pogrom, Nazi propaganda intensified anti-Jewish rhetoric across Germany as tensions built toward the Kristallnacht violence of November 9-10.

A young Jewish refugee shot German diplomat Ernst vom Rath in Paris, an act the Nazis used as pretext for the Kristallnacht pogroms two days later.

As Nazi officials gathered in Munich to commemorate the 1923 putsch, news arrived that a German diplomat shot by a Jewish teenager in Paris had died, triggering the pretext for Kristallnacht.

Nazi paramilitaries and civilians torched synagogues and smashed Jewish shops across Germany and Austria, killing dozens and marking the shift to open violence against Jews.

Action Comics No. 1, featuring the first appearance of Superman, hits newsstands, launching the American superhero comic book genre.