The World in 1937 the year a cartoon ran feature length

About 3.5 million people lived in Shanghai, roughly the size of Chicago. Japanese and Chinese armies fought through its streets for three months that autumn, and families crowded into the foreign quarter to get away from the shelling.

Life back then

Grocery shopping meant carrying a basket until an Oklahoma store owner put wheels under one that summer. Young people crowded into dance halls or fed nickels into a jukebox and danced the jitterbug to swing records. Newspapers came twice a day and children turned straight to the comic strips. Out on the southern plains the dust storms were still blowing, and families packed what they had into the car and drove west looking for work. In Britain anyone could now dial three nines and reach the police, the first emergency number of its kind.

The year in 8 events

• 🕯️Apr 26 German and Italian planes bomb the town of Guernica in Spain. Picasso paints a huge canvas about it within weeks.
• 🕯️May 6 The German airship Hindenburg catches fire while landing in New Jersey. Thirty six people die.
• 👑May 12 George VI is crowned in London. The BBC shows the procession on television, its first big outside broadcast.
• 🌉May 27 The Golden Gate Bridge opens in San Francisco. Around 200,000 people walk across before cars are allowed on.
• ✈️Jul 2 Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan disappear over the Pacific near the end of a flight around the world.
• ⚔️Jul 7 Fighting at the Marco Polo Bridge near Beijing starts full scale war between Japan and China.
• 🕯️Dec 13 Japanese troops take Nanjing, China's capital. The killing of prisoners and civilians over the following weeks becomes known as the Nanjing massacre.
• 🎬Dec 21 Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs premieres in Los Angeles, the first feature length cartoon from Disney.

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