History is the round where confidence gets punished. Most of what people are certain about arrived through a film, a school textbook printed decades ago, or a fact someone repeated at a dinner party in 1993. The dates are usually fine. It is the stories wrapped around the dates that fall apart.
Here are 50 history trivia questions and answers, running from the ancient world to the twentieth century, sorted so the group starts together and ends up genuinely stuck. Every answer is checkable, and a few of them will get you accused of making things up.
Warm-up (safe ground)
1. In which year did World War II end?
Answer: 1945.
2. Who was the first President of the United States?
Answer: George Washington.
3. Which two Japanese cities were hit by atomic bombs in 1945?
Answer: Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
4. Who wrote the first draft of the Declaration of Independence?
Answer: Thomas Jefferson.
5. What was the name of the ship that carried the Pilgrims to America?
Answer: The Mayflower.
6. Which country gave the Statue of Liberty to the United States?
Answer: France.
7. Who led Britain as prime minister through most of World War II?
Answer: Winston Churchill.
8. Who was the first person to walk on the Moon?
Answer: Neil Armstrong, in July 1969.
9. In what year did the Berlin Wall come down?
Answer: 1989.
10. Which civilization built the pyramids at Giza?
Answer: The ancient Egyptians, around 4,500 years ago.
The ancient world
11. Who was the last active pharaoh of Egypt?
Answer: Cleopatra VII. Here is the part that breaks people: she lived closer in time to the Moon landing than to the building of the Great Pyramid.
12. What did the Rosetta Stone make possible?
Answer: Deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs. The same decree appears on it in three scripts, which gave scholars a way in.
13. Which Roman town was buried by Vesuvius in AD 79?
Answer: Pompeii, along with nearby Herculaneum.
14. Who tutored Alexander the Great?
Answer: Aristotle.
15. Which god were the ancient Olympic Games held to honour?
Answer: Zeus, at Olympia, from 776 BC.
16. Which wall did the Romans build across northern Britain?
Answer: Hadrian's Wall, begun around AD 122.
17. What was the Colosseum originally called?
Answer: The Flavian Amphitheatre, after the dynasty that built it.
18. Which civilization built Machu Picchu?
Answer: The Inca, in the fifteenth century.
19. What writing system did the Sumerians develop?
Answer: Cuneiform, pressed into wet clay with a reed. It is one of the earliest known writing systems anywhere.
20. Which event is conventionally used to date the fall of the Western Roman Empire?
Answer: The deposing of Romulus Augustulus in 476.
From castles to revolutions
21. What happened in 1066?
Answer: The Battle of Hastings. William of Normandy took the English throne.
22. What killed roughly a third of Europe's population in the 1300s?
Answer: The Black Death.
23. What document did King John seal in 1215?
Answer: Magna Carta.
24. How long did the Hundred Years' War actually last?
Answer: 116 years, from 1337 to 1453. Nobody involved called it that at the time.
25. Who brought movable-type printing to Europe?
Answer: Johannes Gutenberg, whose Bible was printed around 1455.
26. Who completed the first circumnavigation of the globe?
Answer: Magellan's expedition, but not Magellan. He was killed in the Philippines in 1521, and Juan Sebastian Elcano brought the last surviving ship home in 1522.
27. Which English king had six wives?
Answer: Henry VIII.
28. What began on July 14, 1789?
Answer: The storming of the Bastille, the flashpoint of the French Revolution.
29. Which calendar replaced the Julian one, and when?
Answer: The Gregorian calendar, introduced in 1582. Britain and its colonies held out until 1752 and had to skip 11 days to catch up.
30. Which country became the first to win independence through a successful revolt of enslaved people?
Answer: Haiti, in 1804. Toussaint Louverture led the revolution and Jean-Jacques Dessalines declared independence.
31. Which astronomer was tried in 1633 for arguing that Earth orbits the Sun?
Answer: Galileo Galilei. He spent the rest of his life under house arrest.
32. Which Aztec ruler met Cortes in 1519?
Answer: Moctezuma II.
The twentieth century
33. What event in Sarajevo helped set off World War I?
Answer: The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in June 1914.
34. Which treaty formally ended World War I?
Answer: The Treaty of Versailles, signed in 1919.
35. In what year did the Bolsheviks take power in Russia?
Answer: 1917.
36. What happened on June 6, 1944?
Answer: D-Day, the Allied landings in Normandy.
37. What was the 1962 nuclear standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union called?
Answer: The Cuban Missile Crisis.
38. Who delivered the I Have a Dream speech, and where?
Answer: Martin Luther King Jr., at the March on Washington in August 1963.
39. In what year did the Soviet Union dissolve?
Answer: 1991.
40. Which country was the first to grant women the vote in national elections?
Answer: New Zealand, in 1893.
41. How long was Nelson Mandela imprisoned?
Answer: 27 years.
42. Which US president served the longest?
Answer: Franklin D. Roosevelt, elected four times and in office from 1933 until his death in 1945. The two-term limit was written into law afterwards.
43. What was the Marshall Plan?
Answer: The American programme that funded the rebuilding of Western Europe after World War II.
Hard round (the section that starts fights)
44. What is the oldest continuously operating university in the world?
Answer: Al-Qarawiyyin in Fez, Morocco, founded in 859 by Fatima al-Fihri. It has been teaching ever since.
45. Who had the longest verified reign of any monarch in history?
Answer: Louis XIV of France, 72 years. He took the throne at four years old.
46. Which national flag still in use is the oldest?
Answer: Denmark's, the Dannebrog.
47. Which came first, Oxford University or the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan?
Answer: Oxford. There was teaching there by around 1096, and Tenochtitlan was founded in 1325. Oxford had been running for over two centuries before the Aztecs laid a single stone.
48. What was the Defenestration of Prague?
Answer: Imperial officials thrown out of a castle window in 1618, which helped trigger the Thirty Years' War. All of them survived the fall, which each side promptly explained in its own way.
49. Which war did Australia fight against birds in 1932?
Answer: The Emu War. Soldiers with machine guns were sent after emus wrecking crops in Western Australia. The emus scattered, absorbed the losses, and the operation was called off. The birds won.
50. Who was the shortest-serving US president?
Answer: William Henry Harrison, 31 days in 1841.
Keeping score
Out of 50: over 38 is excellent, 26 to 38 means you would hold your own at any pub quiz, and under 20 usually means the ancient world section went badly. Nobody feels good about the Cleopatra timeline the first time they hear it.
For more rounds, try our sets for geography, science, movies, music, and sports, plus a general knowledge set. If you like the myth-busting angle, we collected the facts almost everyone gets wrong, and there is a short history of trivia itself, which is more interesting than it sounds. Running your own night? Here are 40 theme ideas and the host guide.
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