This Year in History:
1924
Discover what happened in this year with HISTORY’s summaries of major events, anniversaries, famous births and notable deaths.
Two years after British archaeologist Howard Carter and his workmen discovered the tomb of the Pharaoh Tutankhamen near Luxor, Egypt, they uncover the greatest treasure of the tomb—a stone sarcophagus…
On January 9, 1924, Virginia Woolf and her husband buy a house at 52 Tavistock Square, in the Bloomsbury district of London near the British Museum. Woolf had been associated…
Vladimir Lenin, the architect of the Bolshevik Revolution and the first leader of the Soviet Union, dies of a brain hemorrhage at the age of 54. In the early 1890s,…
On January 25, 1924, the first Winter Olympics take off in style at Chamonix in the French Alps. Spectators were thrilled by the ski jump and bobsled as well as…
Woodrow Wilson, the 28th president of the United States, dies in Washington, D.C., at the age of 67. In 1912, Governor Wilson of New Jersey was elected president in a…
The first execution by lethal gas in American history is carried out in Carson City, Nevada. The executed man was Gee Jon, a member of a Chinese gang who was…
“The audience packed a house that could have been sold out at twice the size,” wrote New York Times critic Olin Downes on February 13, 1924, of a concert staged…
John “Jack” Mack, who co‑founded Mack Trucks, Inc.—then known as the Mack Brothers Company—with his brothers Augustus and William, is killed when his car collides with a trolley in Pennsylvania…
Adolf Hitler is sentenced for his role in the Beer Hall Putsch of November 8, 1923. The attempted coup in Munich by right‑wing members of the army and the Nazi…
Patrick Mahon is arrested on suspicion of murder after showing up at the Waterloo train station in London to claim his bag. He quickly confessed that the bloody knife and…
J. Edgar Hoover is named acting director of the Bureau of Investigation (now the FBI) on May 10, 1924. By the end of the year he was officially promoted to…
Fourteen‑year‑old Bobby Franks is abducted from a Chicago, Illinois, street and killed in what later proves to be one of the most unusual murders in American history. The killers, Nathan…
President Calvin Coolidge signs into law the Immigration Act of 1924, the most stringent U.S. immigration policy up to that time in the nation’s history. The new law reflected the…
With Congress’ passage of the Indian Citizenship Act, the government of the United States confers citizenship on all Native Americans born within the territorial limits of the country. Before the…
The first Bush president, George Herbert Walker Bush, is born in Milton, Massachusetts. Bush served in the Navy during World War II and survived a harrowing ordeal when his torpedo…
On October 1, 1924, future President James Earl Carter is born in Plains, Georgia. Carter, who preferred to be called “Jimmy,” was the son of a peanut farmer and was…
On November 1, 1924, William Tilghman is murdered by a corrupt Prohibition agent who resented Tilghman’s refusal to ignore local bootlegging operations. Tilghman, one of the famous marshals who enacted…
On November 4, 1924, California voters pass a measure to legalize professional boxing, a sport outlawed in the state because of safety concerns since 1914. “Manly Art Returns,” reads a…
