Benito Mussolini opened threshing season in Aprilia with the boast that Italy would never buy grain from "the so-called great democracies."[7]
The Cuban House and Senate passed a resolution proclaiming President Roosevelt "eminent citizen of the Americas" and "illustrious adoptive son of Cuba".[8]
A bomb thrown into a crowd of Arabs by Zionists in Jerusalem killed a man and wounded two others. The British sent two warships and an additional brigade to the region.[12]
Hitler opened the Great Exhibition of German Art in Munich with a speech attacking the London exhibition of banned German art, calling modern artists "cultural Neanderthalers" and "lamentable unfortunates who plainly suffer from defective sight."[6][16][17]
Douglas Corrigan took off from Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn, New York supposedly heading back to the West Coast after being denied permission to fly across the Atlantic. To the bewilderment of a few onlookers present, his plane turned 180 degrees and vanished in a cloudbank.[25]
Douglas Corrigan landed in Dublin, Ireland claiming to have gotten lost. Authorities didn't buy his story and suspended his license, but "Wrong Way" Corrigan became a national celebrity back in America.[25]
Salvador Dalí met one of his biggest influences, Sigmund Freud, in London. The Spanish Surrealist showed Freud his painting Metamorphosis of Narcissus and sketched his portrait. Freud wrote enthusiastically the next day of how much Dalí had impressed him and caused him to reassess his previous opinion of the Surrealists as "100 percent fools".[27]
Jews in Germany were ordered to report to police by December 31, 1938 to receive special identification cards that would be required for all dealings with government officials.[1]
At least 34 people were killed in Bogotá, Colombia when a stunt plane crashed into a crowd watching the inauguration of a new airfield. President Alfonso López Pumarejo and president-elect Eduardo Santos narrowly escaped injury when the plane crashed only a few feet from their grandstand.[31]
A bomb explosion killed 43 Arabs in a crowded market in Haifa. At least 4 Jews were killed and 8 wounded in the rioting that followed until a curfew was imposed.[6][33]
The fourth anniversary of the July Putsch was marked in Vienna as a day of "national pride".[34]
Italian Fascist leader Achille Starace said that the Manifesto of Race must be followed by "ulterior political action."[35]
Australia won the fourth test against England to retain The Ashes.[6]
Died:Yakov Alksnis, 41, Latvian-born commander of the Red Army Air Forces (executed in the Great Purge); Alexander Andreyevich Svechin, 59, Russian military leader (executed)
On his seventy-fifth birthday, Henry Ford accepted the Grand Cross of the Order of the German Eagle with a message of personal congratulations from Hitler.[38]
^Hanson, Patricia King, ed. (1993). The American Film Institute Catalog of Motion Pictures Produced in the United States: Feature Films, 1931–1940. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. p. 29. ISBN0-520-07908-6.
^"Spanish Rebels Cross Valencia Province Border". Chicago Daily Tribune. July 17, 1938. p. 7.
^ abCollins, Sandra. "Tokyo/Helsinki 1940." Encyclopedia of the Modern Olympic Movement. Ed. John E. Findling and Kimberley D. Pelle. Greenwood Publishing, 2004. p. 120–121. ISBN978-0-313-32278-5.
^"Seabiscuit Wins and Sets Record in $50,000 Race". Chicago Daily Tribune. July 17, 1938. p. Part 2, p. 1.
^Cortada, James W., ed. (1982). Historical Dictionary of the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press. p. 512. ISBN0-313-22054-9.