1930s Trivia
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99 free 1930s trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
50 free 1930s trivia questions with answers. The Dirty Thirties, the Depression decade, the years between the Crash and the war. This quiz covers the whole of the 1930s: Roosevelt's New Deal and the end of Prohibition, the Dust Bowl and the Grapes of Wrath, Hitler's rise and the Munich Agreement, the Hindenburg and Amelia Earhart, Jesse Owens in Berlin, the Lindbergh kidnapping, Bonnie and Clyde, plus the films, songs, books, inventions and buildings that defined the decade. Fifty questions run from the discovery of Pluto to the invention of the chocolate chip cookie. The easy questions ask which president launched the New Deal and which Disney film became the decade's biggest hit; the hard ones want the year Monopoly went on sale, the seismologist who found the Earth's inner core, the couturière behind the bias cut and the state that ended Prohibition. It suits history buffs, pub quiz teams and anyone whose grandparents grew up on radio serials and swing. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's article on the decade and its linked entries, and each question carries the sentence that backs it up.
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Q 01What nickname did the Dust Bowl earn the decade in the United States?
The Dirty Thirties
The Dirty Thirties: farmers had ploughed up the Plains' deep-rooted grasses to grow wheat, so when drought came the wind lifted the bare topsoil into 'black blizzards' across some 100 million acres.
Q 02Which US president, taking office in 1933, launched the New Deal?
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Franklin D. Roosevelt began by shutting every bank for a few days, then used his first radio 'fireside chat' to urge Americans to bring their savings back; by the end of the month most banks had reopened.
Q 03Which constitutional amendment, ratified on December 5, 1933, ended Prohibition in the United States?
The Twenty-first
The Twenty-first Amendment repealed the Eighteenth, the first time an amendment had been undone; it was ratified by state conventions rather than legislatures, Utah casting the decisive vote on 5 December 1933.
Q 04Which fairy-tale heroine starred in Walt Disney's first full-length animated feature in 1937?
Snow White
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was mocked in the film trade as 'Disney's Folly' while it was being made, then became an immediate box-office sensation when it opened.
Q 05Which two comic-book heroes made their debuts at the end of the decade, in 1938 and 1939?
Superman and Batman
Superman and Batman: Superman's success in the ten-cent anthology Action Comics #1 led his publisher's editors to ask for more costumed heroes, and Bob Kane answered with Batman the following year.
Q 06Which airship exploded over Lakehurst, New Jersey, on May 6, 1937?
Hindenburg
The Hindenburg, a German hydrogen-filled zeppelin, burst into flames while mooring at Lakehurst Naval Air Station; 36 people died, and the disaster ended commercial passenger airship travel.
Q 07Which aviator disappeared over the Pacific in 1937 during an attempted round-the-world flight?
Amelia Earhart
Amelia Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan vanished on 2 July 1937 near Howland Island on the leg from Lae, New Guinea; a two-week US Navy search found no trace of them or their Lockheed Electra.
Q 08Which distant world did Clyde Tombaugh discover at Lowell Observatory in 1930?
Pluto
Pluto was named at the suggestion of Venetia Burney, an 11-year-old Oxford schoolgirl who proposed the Roman god of the underworld; hailed as the ninth planet, it was reclassified as a dwarf planet in 2006.
Q 09Which New York skyscraper opened on May 1, 1931, as the world's tallest building?
The Empire State Building
The Empire State Building went up in a record one year and 45 days; on opening day President Hoover pressed a button in Washington to switch on its lights for the first time.
Q 10Which radio drama of October 30, 1938, did some listeners mistake for a genuine news broadcast?
The War of the Worlds
The War of the Worlds was staged by Orson Welles as news bulletins about Martians landing in New Jersey; newspapers reported nationwide panic, but far fewer listeners were fooled than the headlines claimed.
Q 11Which athlete won four gold medals at the 1936 Berlin Olympics?
Jesse Owens
Jesse Owens won the 100 metres, 200 metres, long jump and sprint relay at Games Hitler meant as a showcase for Aryan supremacy; back home, the president never invited him to the White House.
Q 12Which country hosted and won the 1934 FIFA World Cup, then won again in 1938?
Italy
Italy won as hosts in 1934 and kept the trophy in France in 1938, both times under coach Vittorio Pozzo; with the 1942 and 1946 tournaments lost to war, they stayed world champions for 16 years.
Q 13Which novel about Dust Bowl migrants was the best-selling book in the US in 1939?
The Grapes of Wrath
Q 21Whose quick-frozen foods first went on sale in 1930 in grocery stores around Springfield, Massachusetts?
Clarence Birdseye
Clarence Birdseye, a fur trader in Labrador, had seen fish freeze almost at once in the Arctic cold and still taste fresh when thawed; he copied the effect by pressing packaged food between chilled metal plates.
Q 22The chocolate chip cookie was created in the 1930s at which Massachusetts inn, whose name Nestlé put on its chocolate chips?
The Toll House Inn
The Toll House Inn in Whitman was run by Ruth Wakefield, who in 1938 took an ice pick to a Nestlé semi-sweet chocolate bar and baked the pea-sized bits into her cookies.
Q 23Which colour film, introduced in 1935, was invented by two professional musicians?
The Grapes of Wrath follows the Joad family from Oklahoma to California; the year it topped the bestseller lists it was banned and burned in several places, among them Kern County, where the Joads' journey ends.
Q 14Which novel was America's best-selling book two years running, in 1936 and 1937?
Gone with the Wind
Gone with the Wind began as a cure for boredom: laid up with an injured ankle in 1926, Margaret Mitchell started writing it at home. It sold a million copies in six months and was the only novel she published in her lifetime.
Q 15What is Pearl S. Buck's novel about a Chinese farming family, the top US bestseller of 1931 and 1932?
The Good Earth
The Good Earth drew on Pearl Buck's own life: the daughter of American missionaries, she grew up in China and lived there until 1934, and the novel helped win her the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1938.
Q 16Which Charlie Chaplin film of 1936 was the last to feature his Tramp character?
Modern Times
Modern Times, released in February 1936, was the Tramp's farewell: he sings a gibberish song, the only time his voice is heard, before walking off down the road with Paulette Goddard.
Q 17Which style of jazz became America's most popular music in the later 1930s?
Swing
Swing broke through on 21 August 1935 at the Palomar Ballroom in Los Angeles: after an indifferent first set, Benny Goodman's band switched to its hot Fletcher Henderson arrangements and the dancers cheered.
Q 18Which Cole Porter musical introduced 'You're the Top' and 'I Get a Kick Out of You'?
Anything Goes
Anything Goes was rescued at the last minute: weeks before opening, its producer demanded a new script, and the director Howard Lindsay rewrote the Wodehouse and Bolton original with Russel Crouse.
Q 19Which singer became a radio star in the early 1930s with the intimate style known as 'crooning'?
Bing Crosby
Bing Crosby sang softly and close to the microphone, an intimate style that only the new, more sensitive equipment made possible; his own show on CBS radio then made him a national star.
Q 20Which Delta bluesman recorded 'Cross Road Blues' and 'Hellhound on My Trail' in 1936-37?
Robert Johnson
Robert Johnson left just 29 songs and died in 1938; a 1961 album, King of the Delta Blues Singers, finally carried them to a wide audience and to British players such as Eric Clapton.
Kodachrome
Kodachrome began with two schoolboys who felt cheated by a poor 'colour' film in 1917: Leopold Mannes and Leopold Godowsky Jr. grew up to be working musicians and kept experimenting in their spare time.
Q 24Nylon, introduced in 1939, transformed which part of the clothing industry first?
Hosiery
Hosiery: DuPont aimed nylon at the silk-stocking market, and the first 4,000 pairs put on sale in Wilmington in October 1939 were gone within three hours; wartime then claimed the fibre for parachutes.
Q 25Which dressmaking technique, pioneered by Madeleine Vionnet, gave 1930s evening gowns their clinging drape?
The bias cut
The bias cut means cutting cloth diagonally across the weave so that it stretches and clings; Vionnet's gowns in the style were worn by film stars such as Marlene Dietrich.
Q 26Which British prime minister promised 'peace for our time' after the 1938 Munich Agreement?
Neville Chamberlain
Neville Chamberlain waved the signed declaration at Heston aerodrome on 30 September 1938; within months Hitler had occupied Prague, and less than a year after Munich it was Chamberlain who declared war.
Q 27What was the Anschluss of 1938?
Germany's annexation of Austria
Germany's annexation of Austria came a day before Austria's chancellor was to hold his own referendum on independence; German troops crossed on 12 March 1938, and a plebiscite staged a month later recorded 99.7 per cent approval.
Q 28The 1938 shooting of German diplomat Ernst vom Rath in Paris became the Nazis' pretext for which wave of violence?
Kristallnacht
Kristallnacht followed two days later: Herschel Grynszpan, 17, shot vom Rath after his family was deported from Germany to the Polish border, and the regime used the killing to incite attacks on synagogues and Jewish shops.
Q 29The Spanish Civil War of 1936-39 ended in victory for the Nationalists led by whom?
Francisco Franco
Francisco Franco was not the rising's expected chief: General Sanjurjo, tipped to command it, died in a plane crash days into the war, and within months Franco was named the Nationalists' supreme commander. He ruled until 1975.
Q 30Which Picasso painting, made for the 1937 Paris World's Fair, answered the bombing of a Basque town?
Guernica
Guernica takes its name from the town that German and Italian aircraft bombed for the Nationalists on 26 April 1937; Picasso kept it out of Spain until democracy was restored, and it finally arrived in 1981.