Modern History Trivia
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100 free Modern History trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
58 free Modern history trivia questions with answers. Modern history starts with two bicycle mechanics on a North Carolina beach and runs to a pandemic that shut down the planet. This modern history trivia quiz stays firmly after 1900: Sarajevo and the Somme, Lenin's Bolsheviks, the 1918 flu, Versailles, the Wall Street crash and the New Deal, Weimar and Kristallnacht, Pearl Harbor, Stalingrad, D-Day and Los Alamos. The post-war half covers Nuremberg and partition, the Marshall Plan and the Berlin airlift, Mao's proclamation, Korea and Suez, Sputnik and Gagarin, the Wall going up and coming down, the Cuban missiles, Dallas, Montgomery, Vietnam, the Six-Day War, Prague, Apollo 11, Watergate, Iran, Solidarity, Chernobyl, Tiananmen, the end of the USSR, Mandela, Maastricht, Rwanda, 9/11, the Arab Spring, Brexit and COVID. The questions run from easy to expert, so it works for a classroom, a pub round or a solo check of how much of the last century actually stuck. Every answer is checked against a cited source shown under the question.
30 of 100 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The Wright brothers made the first controlled, powered flight in December 1903 near which town?
Kitty Hawk in North Carolina
Kitty Hawk in North Carolina was chosen for its strong, steady winds; the brothers flew from the dunes at Kill Devil Hills, four miles south, and the first flight covered just 120 feet.
Q 02The Titanic sank in April 1912 on a voyage from Southampton to where?
New York City
New York City received the survivors instead: the liner Carpathia picked them up from the lifeboats and landed them there three days after the sinking, which took about 1,500 of the 2,200 aboard.
Q 03Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in June 1914 in which city?
Sarajevo
In Sarajevo on 28 June 1914 the Bosnian Serb student Gavrilo Princip shot the Archduke and his wife Sophie at close range, lighting the fuse of the First World War.
Q 04The first day of which 1916 battle, 1 July, is the bloodiest in the British Army's history?
The Somme
The Somme cost Britain 57,470 casualties on 1 July 1916, 19,240 of them dead, after a week-long bombardment failed to cut the German barbed wire or silence the defenders.
Q 05The Balfour Declaration of November 1917 was a letter from the British foreign secretary to whom?
Lord Rothschild
Lord Rothschild, a leader of Britain's Jewish community, received Balfour's letter of 2 November 1917 with a request to pass its pledge of a Jewish 'national home' on to the Zionist Federation.
Q 06Who led the Bolsheviks in the October Revolution of 1917?
Vladimir Lenin
Vladimir Lenin led the Bolshevik seizure of power in Petrograd on 7 November 1917 (25 October in the old Russian calendar), toppling Kerensky's Provisional Government.
Q 07Which country gave its name to the 1918 influenza pandemic, although the first recorded cases were in Kansas?
Spain
Spain was neutral in the First World War, so its uncensored newspapers reported the outbreak freely, even the king's illness, while the warring countries kept theirs quiet.
Q 08In which room at Versailles was the 1919 peace treaty signed?
The Hall of Mirrors
The Hall of Mirrors had hosted the reverse scene in 1871, when the German Empire was proclaimed in the same room after Prussia's victory over France.
Q 09Gandhi's 1930 march to Dandi was a protest against what?
The British salt monopoly
The British salt monopoly made it illegal for Indians to collect their own salt; at Dandi Gandhi picked up a lump from the shore, and some 60,000 people were jailed for following his lead.
Q 10What name is given to 29 October 1929, when panicked investors dumped some 16 million shares on Wall Street?
Black Tuesday
Black Tuesday followed a 13% plunge the day before; by mid-November the Dow had lost almost half its value, and the slide into the Great Depression had begun.
Q 11Which president introduced the phrase 'New Deal' when accepting his party's nomination in 1932?
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Franklin D. Roosevelt broke with tradition by flying to Chicago to accept the nomination in person, and there promised the convention 'a new deal for the American people'.
Q 12Germany's interwar republic takes its name from which city?
Weimar
Weimar hosted the national assembly in 1919 because Berlin was judged unsafe after an uprising there; the republic lasted until Hitler took power in 1933.
Q 13The Spanish Civil War was fought between the Republicans and which rebel side?
The Nationalists
Q 21Which Nazi leader, sentenced to hang at Nuremberg, swallowed cyanide the night before his execution?
Hermann Göring
Hermann Göring, once Hitler's designated successor, had asked to face a firing squad and been refused; the other ten condemned men in custody went to the gallows on 16 October 1946.
Q 22Who gave the 'tryst with destiny' speech as India became independent at midnight on 14-15 August 1947?
Jawaharlal Nehru
Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister, spoke to the Constituent Assembly in Delhi; Gandhi was not there, having gone to Calcutta to try to calm the violence between Hindus and Muslims.
Q 23Which president signed the Marshall Plan for rebuilding Western Europe into law in April 1948?
The Nationalists under Franco, backed by Germany and Italy, beat the Soviet-backed Republic in a war that ran from July 1936 to April 1939; Franco then ruled as dictator until he died in 1975.
Q 14By what name is the Nazi pogrom of 9-10 November 1938 known?
Kristallnacht
Kristallnacht, the 'Night of Broken Glass', was named for the shattered glass left in the streets; tens of thousands of Jewish men were arrested and sent to concentration camps.
Q 15Which August 1939 pact secretly carved up Eastern Europe between Germany and the USSR?
The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact
The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 23 August 1939 carried a secret protocol dividing Poland, the Baltic states and Bessarabia between Germany and the USSR; Germany invaded Poland on 1 September.
Q 16Which battleship sunk at Pearl Harbor still lies beneath a memorial?
USS Arizona
USS Arizona blew up when a bomb set off her forward magazine, accounting for almost half of the 2,403 Americans killed that day; more than 900 of her crew are still entombed in the wreck.
Q 17Which World War II battle, which ended in February 1943, is considered the largest and deadliest urban battle in history?
Stalingrad
Stalingrad ended on 2 February 1943 with the surrender of Paulus's Sixth Army; roughly two million soldiers and civilians were killed, wounded or captured in the city's ruins.
Q 18Which of the five D-Day beaches saw the highest casualties?
Omaha
Omaha was the worst of the five beaches because the bombardment had left the German defences on the bluffs largely intact, and the first American waves were cut down by machine-gun fire.
Q 19The atomic bombs used in 1945 were designed at which laboratory?
Los Alamos
Los Alamos, directed by Robert Oppenheimer, was set up in the commandeered buildings of a remote boys' ranch school and turned out both bomb designs, Little Boy and Fat Man.
Q 20Which B-29 bomber dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima on 6 August 1945?
Enola Gay
Enola Gay was named by its pilot, Paul Tibbets, after his mother; three days later a second B-29, Bockscar, dropped the plutonium bomb on Nagasaki.
Harry Truman
Harry Truman signed it on 3 April 1948; the aid had been offered to the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe too, but Moscow turned it down for itself and its satellites.
Q 24How did the Western Allies supply West Berlin for almost a year after the Soviets blockaded it in 1948?
By cargo aircraft
By cargo aircraft: with rail, road and canal links cut from 24 June 1948, the Berlin Airlift carried in food and fuel until the Soviets gave up the blockade on 12 May 1949.
Q 25To which island did Chiang Kai-shek's government retreat after losing China's civil war in 1949?
Taiwan
Taiwan became the refuge of Chiang's Republic of China after the People's Republic was proclaimed on 1 October 1949; from there it went on holding China's seat at the United Nations until 1971.
Q 26Along which line was Korea divided into occupation zones after 1945?
The 38th parallel
The 38th parallel was no historic border: two young American officials drew it across a map in August 1945 to split the peninsula roughly in half, and North Korea invaded across it on 25 June 1950.
Q 27Who nationalised the Suez Canal in 1956, prompting invasion by Britain, France and Israel?
Gamal Abdel Nasser
Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalised the canal on 26 July 1956; pressure from both the US and the USSR forced Britain, France and Israel to withdraw, leaving the two old colonial powers visibly weakened.
Q 28The Treaty of Rome, signed in 1957, created what?
The European Economic Community
The European Economic Community began with six members on 1 January 1958; Britain stayed out, then had two applications vetoed by France's Charles de Gaulle before finally joining in 1973.
Q 29Which dog became the first animal to orbit Earth, launched by the Soviet Union in November 1957?
Laika
Laika, a stray taken from the streets of Moscow, died of overheating within hours of launch; the Soviets long said she had lived for days, and the truth came out only in 2002.
Q 30Aboard which spacecraft did Yuri Gagarin become the first person in space on 12 April 1961?
Vostok 1
Vostok 1 carried Gagarin once around Earth, but he did not land in it: he ejected during the descent and came down by parachute, a detail left out of the Soviet record claim.