1920s Trivia
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This 1920s trivia quiz has 230 free questions with answers and covers the whole Roaring Twenties, not just the flapper dresses. It opens with the big American story - Prohibition and the Volstead Act, the speakeasies, Al Capone and the Saint Valentine's Day Massacre - then moves through women's suffrage, the Harding scandals, Silent Cal's kerosene-lamp swearing-in, the Scopes 'monkey trial' and the crash of October 1929. There is science and culture too: the discovery of insulin and penicillin, Tutankhamun's tomb, Lindbergh's 33 hours over the Atlantic, the first talkie, Babe Ruth's 60 home runs, The Great Gatsby, Winnie-the-Pooh, Mickey Mouse, the Charleston, the Harlem Renaissance and the first Winter Olympics - plus a look abroad at Weimar Germany's hyperinflation, Mussolini and the Irish Free State. About a third of the questions are easy warm-ups; the rest climb toward the kind of detail only a Jazz Age obsessive would know. Every answer has been checked against Wikipedia and the primary sources it cites, and each explanation adds one more thing worth knowing.
30 of 230 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01National Prohibition began in January 1920, but which of these did the Eighteenth Amendment leave legal?
Drinking liquor
Drinking liquor was never outlawed: the amendment banned making, selling, transporting and importing it, so bottles bought before January 1920 could still be drunk at home.
Q 02What was the popular name of the 1919 law that defined 'intoxicating liquors' and set penalties for making them?
The Volstead Act
The Volstead Act, named for Minnesota congressman Andrew Volstead, became law in October 1919 when Congress overrode Woodrow Wilson's veto; it defined 'intoxicating' as anything over 0.5 percent alcohol.
Q 03Which spirit, easily faked at home in a bathtub, became the staple of speakeasy cocktails during Prohibition?
Gin
Gin was the easiest spirit to counterfeit: bootleggers mixed cheap grain alcohol with water and juniper flavouring, and cocktails caught on partly to mask the taste.
Q 04Al Capone was finally sent to prison in 1931 for what crime?
Tax evasion
Tax evasion stuck because a 1927 Supreme Court ruling had made even illegal income taxable, so prosecutors only had to prove what Capone earned, not how; he got eleven years.
Q 05Two gunmen in the 1929 Saint Valentine's Day Massacre were disguised as what?
Police officers
Police officers' uniforms were the disguise: seven of Bugs Moran's men were lined up against a garage wall and shot, while Moran himself was running late and escaped.
Q 06Which state's narrow vote in August 1920 provided the 36th ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment?
Tennessee
Tennessee's House had twice tied 48–48 on shelving the amendment before 24-year-old Harry Burn changed sides, having received a letter from his mother that morning urging him to back ratification.
Q 07Warren G. Harding's winning 1920 campaign slogan promised a 'return to' what?
Normalcy
Normalcy was not Harding's own coinage: dictionaries date the word to the 1850s. He used it in a Boston speech in May 1920 and won that November in a landslide.
Q 08Who swore in Harding's successor by kerosene lamp in a Vermont farmhouse in 1923?
The new president's father
The new president's father, John Coolidge, was a notary public, so he administered the oath to his son in a farmhouse with no electricity or telephone; Calvin Coolidge then went back to bed.
Q 09Coolidge's dry, taciturn manner earned him what nickname?
Silent Cal
'Silent Cal' was also the only US president born on the Fourth of July, and he bowed out of the 1928 race with the terse line 'I do not choose to run.'
Q 10In which small town, chosen deliberately to attract publicity, was the 1925 Scopes 'monkey trial' staged?
Dayton
Dayton's businessmen staged the case as a publicity stunt and recruited John Scopes, a football coach and science teacher who had only filled in for the biology teacher; the jury took nine minutes to convict him.
Q 11Which three-time presidential candidate argued for the prosecution at the Scopes trial?
William Jennings Bryan
William Jennings Bryan, though arguing for the prosecution, let the defence call him to the stand as an expert on the Bible; he died in his sleep five days after the trial ended.
Q 12What was the name of the plane Charles Lindbergh flew alone from New York to Paris in May 1927?
Spirit of St. Louis
Spirit of St. Louis had its main fuel tank in front of the cockpit, leaving no windscreen, so Lindbergh could see ahead only through a periscope or by turning to look out of a side window.
Q 13Which magazine named Lindbergh its first-ever 'Man of the Year' for 1927?
Time
Q 21Which car did Ford launch in December 1927 to replace the Model T?
Model A
The Model A went back to the start of the alphabet instead of moving on to U: Ford revived the name of a car it had built in 1903 and 1904, ending the Model T's 18-year run.
Q 22October 29, 1929, when some 16 million shares changed hands in a panic, is remembered as what?
Black Tuesday
Black Tuesday came five days after Black Thursday's first panic, and it was no one-day event: share prices kept sliding until July 1932.
Q 23How many old paper marks did one new Rentenmark replace when Germany ended its hyperinflation in 1923?
One trillion
One trillion paper marks were swapped for a single Rentenmark from November 1923; the new notes were backed by mortgages on German farmland and business property, and by 1924 the currency had stabilised.
Time is said to have created the title to make amends: its editors had not put Lindbergh on the cover after his flight in May 1927, so they named him Man of the Year that winter.
Q 14In what role did Amelia Earhart become the first woman to cross the Atlantic by air in 1928?
As a passenger
As a passenger, Earhart never touched the controls: Wilmer Stultz did all the flying, and she said afterwards that she had been 'just baggage, like a sack of potatoes'.
Q 15When Lord Carnarvon asked if he could see anything inside Tutankhamun's tomb in 1922, what did Howard Carter famously reply?
Wonderful things
'Wonderful things' is the polished reply from Carter's book; the notes he wrote at the time record a plainer 'Yes, it is wonderful'.
Q 16Banting and Best first extracted insulin in 1921 at the university of which Canadian city?
Toronto
Toronto's Frederick Banting shared his 1923 Nobel Prize money with Charles Best, who had been left off the award, and the team sold the insulin patent to the university for one dollar.
Q 17Banting and Best's first insulin experiments in 1921 used pancreases taken from which animals?
Dogs
Dogs supplied the first extract, but the dose injected into the first patient, teenager Leonard Thompson, in January 1922 was so impure that it caused an allergic reaction and had to be refined.
Q 18Who discovered penicillin in 1928 in his laboratory at St Mary's Hospital, London?
Alexander Fleming
Alexander Fleming called his find 'mould juice' for months and only named it penicillin in March 1929; it took Howard Florey and Ernst Chain to turn it into a usable drug.
Q 19Which 1927 film, with sound on Vitaphone discs, is credited with ending the silent era?
The Jazz Singer
The Jazz Singer is mostly a silent film with title cards: only its songs and a few scenes of largely ad-libbed talk were recorded, yet that was enough to start the rush to sound.
Q 20Babe Ruth hit 60 home runs in 1927 for a Yankees lineup known by what nickname?
Murderers' Row
Murderers' Row was borrowed from a row of cells in New York's Tombs prison, and the name was first pinned on a Yankees batting order in 1918, two years before Ruth joined the team.
Q 24Roughly how many copies had The Great Gatsby sold by October 1925, six months after publication?
Fewer than 20,000
The Great Gatsby sold fewer than 20,000 copies by October 1925; Scribner's second printing of 3,000 had not sold out when Fitzgerald died in 1940 believing his work forgotten.
Q 25In The Great Gatsby, Nick Carraway rents a bungalow in which fictional Long Island village, next to Gatsby's mansion?
West Egg
West Egg is, in Nick's words, 'the less fashionable of the two', the new-money shore where Gatsby bought his mansion so that Daisy, with the green light on her dock in East Egg, would be just across the bay.
Q 26Which dance craze took off after a 1923 James P. Johnson tune in the Broadway revue Runnin' Wild?
The Charleston
The Charleston took its beat from a rhythm that Johnson said he first heard from South Carolina dockworkers; Runnin' Wild opened on Broadway in October 1923 and the tune became one of the hits of the decade.
Q 27Which 1925 comic novel by Anita Loos follows the gold-digging flapper Lorelei Lee?
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes began, by Loos's own account, as a joke about her friend H. L. Mencken's weakness for a young blonde actress, and it became an international bestseller.
Q 28Which 1925 anthology, edited by Alain Locke, gathered the leading writers of the Harlem Renaissance?
The New Negro
The New Negro grew out of a March 1925 issue of Survey Graphic magazine on Harlem that Locke guest-edited; that December he expanded it into a book.
Q 29Louis Armstrong helped popularize scat singing with which 1926 Hot Five recording?
'Heebie Jeebies'
'Heebie Jeebies', recorded by the Hot Five in 1926, made scat famous; legend says Armstrong improvised the syllables after dropping his lyric sheet, though others had scatted on record years earlier.
Q 30Duke Ellington's orchestra became famous through its residency at which Harlem nightclub from 1927?
The Cotton Club
The Cotton Club booking had been turned down first by King Oliver; Ellington had to expand from six to eleven players just to audition.