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49 free Historical Trivia Facts trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Historical trivia facts are the ones that make you say 'wait, really?' A war that lasted less than an hour. Woolly mammoths still alive while the Great Pyramid was being built. A tsar who taxed beards. A president whose grandson was alive in 2025. Nintendo founded in 1889. Every question in this quiz is built around a fact like that, drawn from ancient Rome and Egypt, medieval Europe, the age of empires and the twentieth century. The set is written for curious adults and older students rather than specialists. Some questions are easy if you have heard the story before; others are genuinely obscure. Along the way it quietly corrects a few things everyone gets wrong: nobody at Salem was burned, Washington's teeth were not wooden, Nero could not have played a fiddle, and the Great Wall is not visible from the Moon. Every answer has been checked against a primary reference source, usually the encyclopaedia entry for the event, and each question shows its source after you answer, so you can go and read the whole strange story yourself.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The shortest recorded war, between Britain and Zanzibar in 1896, lasted roughly how long?
About 40 minutes
It lasted about 40 minutes: British warships opened fire at 9:02 a.m. on 27 August 1896 and the sultan's palace had surrendered by roughly 9:40.
Q 02Teaching at which university is documented as early as 1096?
Oxford
Oxford: teaching there is recorded from 1096, making it the oldest university in the English-speaking world, older than the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan, founded in 1325.
Q 03The Great Fire of London in 1666 started in a bakery on which street?
Pudding Lane
The fire began on 2 September 1666 in Thomas Farriner's bakery on Pudding Lane and went on to destroy more than 13,000 houses and St Paul's Cathedral.
Q 04Which agency, approved by Lincoln the day he was shot, was founded in 1865 to fight counterfeit money?
The Secret Service
The Secret Service was created in 1865 inside the Treasury to suppress counterfeit currency; it took on full-time presidential protection only after William McKinley's assassination in 1901.
Q 05By legend, Caligula planned to give which office to his favourite horse, Incitatus?
Consul
Suetonius wrote that Caligula intended to make Incitatus consul; it never happened, and some historians read the story as a jibe at the Senate rather than madness.
Q 06How many years did the Hundred Years' War between England and France actually last?
116
It lasted 116 years, running with long truces from 1337 to 1453, and ended with England holding almost nothing in France but Calais.
Q 07L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland is the only confirmed North American settlement of which people?
The Norse (Vikings)
Roughly five centuries before Columbus. Tree-ring evidence pins Norse activity there to the year 1021.
Q 08Woolly mammoths survived where in the Arctic until about 2000 BC, centuries after the Great Pyramid was finished?
Wrangel Island
Wrangel Island, off Siberia's Arctic coast, held an isolated herd that survived until roughly 2000 BC, outliving every mainland mammoth population by thousands of years.
Q 09Nintendo was founded in Kyoto in 1889 to make what?
Playing cards
Fusajiro Yamauchi founded Nintendo in 1889 to make hanafuda playing cards; the company did not release its first video game until the 1970s.
Q 10Alexander Bain's 1843 'electric printing telegraph' patent was an early version of which device?
The fax machine
A commercial fax service ran between Paris and Lyon in 1865, eleven years before the telephone was invented.
Q 11What saved the Eiffel Tower from being dismantled 20 years after the 1889 World's Fair?
Its usefulness as a radio antenna
Its usefulness as a radio antenna: Gustave Eiffel's radiotelegraphy experiments from 1903 gave the tower a military purpose, so Paris let it stand when its 20-year permit ended in 1909.
Q 12As a young man, Julius Caesar was kidnapped and held for ransom by whom?
Pirates
Pirates: Cilician pirates seized Caesar around 75 BC. Plutarch says he joked that he would return and crucify them, and after his ransom was paid he did exactly that.
Q 13In 1698 Tsar Peter the Great of Russia introduced a tax on what?
Beards
Q 21For most of their history, athletes at the ancient Olympic Games competed how?
Naked
Naked: athletes competed nude, and the Greek gymnos ('naked') gives us 'gymnasium'. The Games were held every four years at Olympia from 776 BC for an olive wreath.
Q 22In January 1943, US officials briefly banned the sale of what as a wartime conservation measure?
Sliced bread
Sliced bread: the ban, meant to save the heavier wax wrapping sliced loaves needed and the steel in slicing machines, drew such outcry that it was lifted after about seven weeks in March 1943.
Q 23How were the nineteen people executed for witchcraft at Salem in 1692 put to death?
By hanging
Men who paid carried a copper or silver 'beard token' as proof. The tax was meant to push Russians toward clean-shaven Western fashions.
Q 14In which year did the last surviving grandson of President John Tyler, born 1790, die?
2025
2025: Harrison Ruffin Tyler died that May aged 96. Born in 1928, 66 years after the president's death, he was the son of Lyon Gardiner Tyler, fathered when John Tyler was 63.
Q 15In what year did France carry out its last execution by guillotine?
1977
1977: Hamida Djandoubi was guillotined in Marseille on 10 September 1977, a few months after Star Wars opened in American cinemas. France abolished the death penalty in 1981.
Q 16Which country's parliament, the Althing, was established in 930 and claims to be the oldest in the world?
Iceland
Iceland's Althing first met in 930 at Þingvellir, an open-air site in a rift valley where the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates pull apart.
Q 17When Coca-Cola launched in 1886, its two key ingredients were caffeine and what?
Cocaine
Cocaine, from coca leaf extract, paired with caffeine from the kola nut. Sold first as a patent medicine, Coca-Cola removed the cocaine from its recipe around 1903.
Q 18In which year did women in Switzerland gain the right to vote in federal elections?
1971
1971: a national referendum that February gave Swiss women the federal vote. The canton of Appenzell Innerrhoden held out on local votes until the Federal Supreme Court forced it in 1990.
Q 19Which country was the first to give all women the vote in national elections, in 1893?
New Zealand
New Zealand's Electoral Act of 19 September 1893 enfranchised all adult women, who voted for the first time in the general election ten weeks later that November.
Q 20What did China's first astronaut, Yang Liwei, say about the Great Wall after his 2003 spaceflight?
That he had not been able to see it
NASA says the wall is barely visible from low orbit even in perfect conditions and no more conspicuous than a highway. The Moon claim is a myth.
By hanging: all nineteen were hanged. A twentieth victim, Giles Corey, was pressed to death with stones for refusing to enter a plea, and nobody at Salem was burned.
Q 24After President Chaim Weizmann died in 1952, which scientist was offered the presidency of Israel and declined?
Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein was offered the post after Weizmann's death in November 1952 and declined, saying he lacked both the natural aptitude and the experience to deal properly with people.
Q 25Construction of the Leaning Tower of Pisa took place in three stages over roughly how many years?
199
199 years, from 1173 to 1372. It began to sink while the second floor was going up in 1178, and long pauses for war may have let the soil settle enough to stop it toppling.
Q 26Mansa Musa gave away so much gold on his 1324 pilgrimage that gold prices fell for years in which city?
Cairo
Cairo: Musa spent and gave away so much gold there that a gold mithqal fell from 25 silver dirhams to under 22, and the price had not recovered twelve years later.
Q 27Contrary to legend, George Washington's false teeth were never made from which material?
Wood
Wood: his dentures used hippopotamus ivory, brass, gold and human teeth, but never wood. The wooden-teeth myth appeared in school textbooks well into the twentieth century.
Q 28According to the historian Tacitus, where was Nero when the Great Fire of Rome broke out in AD 64?
At Antium, outside the city
Tacitus says he hurried back to organise relief. The instrument he supposedly played would have been a lyre; the fiddle did not exist yet.
Q 29How must Marie Curie's laboratory notebooks from the 1890s be stored?
In lead-lined boxes because they are radioactive
In lead-lined boxes because they are radioactive: the notebooks are contaminated with radium-226, whose half-life is about 1,600 years, so readers at the Bibliothèque nationale de France must wear protective clothing.
Q 30What kind of entertainment was a Roman 'naumachia'?
A staged naval battle
A staged naval battle: Titus put on two naumachiae for the Colosseum's opening games in AD 80, one of them reportedly inside the flooded new amphitheatre itself.