1932

Centuries: 19th century - 20th century - 21st century

Decades: 1880s 1890s 1900s 1910s 1920s - 1930s - 1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s

Years: 1927 1928 1929 1930 1931 - 1932 - 1933 1934 1935 1936 1937

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Events

• January 12 - Hattie W. Caraway becomes the first woman elected to the United States Senate.
• January 28 - Japan occupies Shanghai
• February 4 - Japan occupies Harbin, China
• February 4 - 1932 Winter Olympics open in Lake Placid, New York
• February 18 - Japan declares Manzhouguo (Japanese name for Manchuria) independent from China
• March 1 - Charles Lindbergh's baby boy is kidnapped
• November - Franklin D. Roosevelt defeats Herbert Hoover in the U.S. presidential election

• In a bloodless revolution, Thailand becomes a constitutional monarchy.
• The Generalitat reinstaurated, Catalonia regains political autonomy inside the 2nd Spanish Republic.
• Second Polar Year, an international scientific collaboration.

Art, Culture & Fashion

• 1932 in film
  • Grand Hotel
  • Shanghai Express
  • One Hour with You
  • Shirley Temple's film career begins
• 1932 in literature
  • Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
  • Selected Essays, 1917-1932 by T. S. Eliot
  • Waterless Mountain by Laura Adams Armer
  • Light in August by William Faulkner
• 1932 in music
• 1932 in sports
• 1932 in television
  • November 8 - For the first time, a television network (CBS) reports on the presidential election, with commentary, vote tallys, and still cartoons of the politicians
  • RCA demonstrates an electronic television system

Births

• January 3 - Dabney Coleman, actor
• January 4 - Carlos Saura, director
• January 5 - Umberto Eco, author
• January 5 - Raisa Gorbachev, political consort, (+ 1999)
• January 16 - Dian Fossey, zoologist (+ 1985)
• January 18 - Robert Anton Wilson, author
• January 22 - Piper Laurie, actress
• February 3 - Peggy Ann Garner, actress (+ 1984)
• February 6 - François Truffaut, French film director (+ 1984)
• February 7 - Gay Talese, author
• February 8 - John Williams, composer, conductor
• February 9 - Gerhard Richter, painter and graphic artist
• February 11 - Jerome Lowenthal, pianist/professor
• February 14 - Alexander Kluge, actor and film director
• February 18 - Milos Forman, film director
• February 22 - Edward Kennedy, politician and brother of John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy
• February 24 - Michel Legrand, composer
• February 25 - Faron Young country music singer (+ 1996)
• February 26 - Johnny Cash, country music singer
• February 27 - Elizabeth Taylor, actress
• March 4 - Miriam Makeba, singer
• April 4 - Andrei Tarkovsky, Russian movie director (+ 1986)
• April 12 - Tiny Tim, musician
• April 27 - Gian-Carlo Rota, Italian-born American mathematician and philosopher
• July 2 - Dave Thomas - founder of Wendy's International
• July 9 - Donald Rumsfeld, US Secretary of Defence (2001-present)
• August 6 - Howard Hodgkin, painter and print-maker
• August 17 - V. S. Naipaul, writer
• September 25 - Glenn Gould, Canadian pianist
• November 29 - Jacques Chirac, president of France
• December 28 - Roy Hattersley, British politician

Deaths

• March 6 - John Philip Sousa, band leader, conductor, composer
• March 7 - Aristide Briand, diplomat, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize (1928)
• April 20 - Giuseppe Peano, Italian mathematician

Science

• The Kennedy-Thorndike experiment shows that measured time as well as length are affected by motion, in accordance with the theory of special relativity.
• Chadwick discovers the neutron.
• Geneticist J. B. S. Haldane publishes The Causes of Evolution and thereby unifies the findings of Mendelian genetics with those of evolutionary science.

Nobel Prizes

• Physics - Werner Karl Heisenberg
• Chemistry - Irving Langmuir
• Medicine - Sir Charles Scott Sherrington, Edgar Douglas Adrian
• Literature -John Galsworthy
• Peace - Not awarded.