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50 free 50s and 60s trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Two decades that began with 4.4 million American TV sets and ended with a man on the Moon. In between: a polio vaccine, the first credit card, rock and roll, the Montgomery bus boycott, Sputnik, the day the music died, the pill, the Berlin Wall, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Beatlemania, the March on Washington, the miniskirt, the first heart transplant, Woodstock and ARPANET. These 50 questions cover both decades evenly, history and pop culture alike, and are pitched so that people who lived through them and people who only know the reruns can both play. Easy questions ask who sparked the bus boycott and who was first in space; hard ones ask where the MOSFET was invented and who founded Liquid Paper. Every answer is cited to a page we checked, with a short explanation so you learn something even when you miss. Play it solo or print it for a reminiscence session or a themed party.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which Soviet satellite, launched in October 1957, started the Space Race?
Sputnik 1
It weighed 184 pounds; the US answered with NASA in 1958.
Q 02Which war lasted from June 1950 until an armistice in July 1953?
Korean War
It began as a civil war between North and South Korea.
Q 03Whose nationalisation of the Suez Canal in 1956 triggered an invasion by Britain, France and Israel?
Gamal Abdel Nasser
The operation succeeded militarily but US and Soviet pressure forced a withdrawal.
Q 04Who overthrew Fulgencio Batista in Cuba in 1959?
Fidel Castro
It created the first communist government in the Western hemisphere.
Q 05The 1956 Montgomery bus boycott was sparked by which activist?
Rosa Parks
It ended when Browder v. Gayle struck down Alabama's segregated bus laws.
Q 06Which disease saw a turning point in the 1950s with a successful vaccine?
Polio
Cases fell rapidly in industrialised countries after widespread use in the mid-1950s.
Q 07Which pair announced the double-helix structure of DNA in the early 1950s?
Crick and Watson
Rosalind Franklin's work contributed to the discovery.
Q 08What was the first widely popular credit card, launched in New York in the 1950s?
Diners Club
Credit cards soon spread to multiple countries.
Q 09The MOSFET transistor, the building block of modern electronics, was invented in 1959 at which lab?
Bell Labs
Mohamed Atalla and Dawon Kahng created it; it became the most manufactured device in history.
Q 10Who founded Liquid Paper after inventing an early correction fluid in 1956?
Bette Nesmith Graham
She was the mother of Monkees member Michael Nesmith.
Q 11What name was given to the first immortal human cell line, cultured in 1951?
HeLa
They came from a cervical cancer patient named Henrietta Lacks.
Q 12Which 1959 plane crash became known as 'the Day the Music Died'?
Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper
Don McLean's 1971 'American Pie' popularised the phrase.
Q 13Which comic strip debuted in the 1950s and became the most successful of all time?
Peanuts
It ran until creator Charles M. Schulz's death in 2000.
Q 21Where were the 1956 Summer Olympics held?
Melbourne
Helsinki hosted in 1952 and Rome in 1960.
Q 22Which Soviet craft became the first to reach the Moon's surface in September 1959?
Luna 2
It was the first spacecraft to make contact with another celestial body.
Q 23Which synthetic fibre was introduced in 1959?
Spandex
Acrylics arrived in 1950, polyesters in 1953 and triacetate in 1954.
Q 24Who became the first human in space on 12 April 1961?
Q 14Which 1959 epic won a record 11 Academy Awards?
Ben-Hur
Its success revived MGM.
Q 15Audrey Hepburn won her Best Actress Oscar for which 1953 film?
Roman Holiday
The same decade saw Fellini win the first foreign-language film Oscar with La Strada.
Q 16Which 1950s film introduced rock and roll music to America's national consciousness?
Blackboard Jungle
It came amid the mid-1950s rush of teenage rebellion films starring Brando and James Dean.
Q 17Which Disney animated films came out in the 1950s?
Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty
Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan and Lady and the Tramp also belong to the decade.
Q 18How many American families owned a television set by 1950?
4.4 million
By the end of the decade most US households had one.
Q 19Which of these was among the most popular TV shows of the 1950s?
I Love Lucy
Howdy Doody, The Honeymooners and The Mickey Mouse Club were others.
Q 20Which president inaugurated transcontinental US television service in 1951?
Harry S. Truman
AT&T carried his San Francisco speech coast to coast.
Yuri Gagarin
The Vostok 1 flight spurred Kennedy's pledge to reach the Moon within the decade.
Q 25Who became the first woman in space in June 1963?
Valentina Tereshkova
She flew on Vostok 6.
Q 26Who stayed in orbit as Command Module Pilot while Armstrong and Aldrin walked on the Moon?
Michael Collins
Apollo 11 launched on 16 July 1969 and landed on 20 July.
Q 27What made the 1960 Kennedy–Nixon debates a historic first?
They were televised
Kennedy won a very close election.
Q 28Which volunteer programme did President Kennedy establish in 1961?
Peace Corps
He also promised a more aggressive stance toward the Soviet Union.
Q 29In which month and year did the Cuban Missile Crisis take place?
October 1962
Khrushchev agreed to remove the missiles after a US naval quarantine of Cuba.
Q 30Construction of the Berlin Wall was authorised in which year?
1961
East Germany built it to stop its citizens leaving for West Berlin.