1919
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50 free 1919 trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
The year 1919 was meant to be the first year of peace. Instead it found the world trying to rebuild itself all at once: statesmen redrawing maps in Paris, workers walking off the job, empires facing revolt and pilots racing to cross oceans by air. This quiz covers the whole year. There are questions on the peace settlement and the new nations and movements it stirred up, on American headlines from a strange Boston disaster to a fixed World Series, and on the flyers, scientists, artists and athletes who made news. A few famous births and deaths round it out. It suits history fans, anyone tracing a family story from just after the Great War, and hosts planning a themed quiz night or classroom review. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so the questions work on screen or read aloud.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which sticky substance burst from a storage tank and flooded Boston's North End in January 1919, killing 21 people?
Molasses
Molasses surged through the streets in a wave about 25 feet high, moving at an estimated 35 miles per hour. Residents said the neighbourhood smelled sweet on hot summer days for decades.
Q 02In which room of the Palace of Versailles was the peace treaty with Germany signed on 28 June 1919?
Hall of Mirrors
The Hall of Mirrors was picked by France's prime minister because the German Empire had been proclaimed there in 1871. The empire was dismantled in the very room where it began.
Q 03Eight players from which baseball team were accused of taking gamblers' money to lose the 1919 World Series?
Chicago White Sox
Chicago White Sox players were cleared by a jury in 1921, yet all eight were banned from the game for life. The affair is remembered as the Black Sox Scandal.
Q 04Which physicist won worldwide fame in November 1919 after eclipse photographs showed that gravity bends starlight?
Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein had predicted the bending in his general theory of relativity. Arthur Eddington tested it during a total solar eclipse seen from the West African island of Príncipe.
Q 05What did the Volstead Act, passed over Woodrow Wilson's veto in October 1919, set out to enforce across America?
Prohibition
Prohibition gained its teeth from the act, which counted any drink stronger than 0.5 percent alcohol as intoxicating. It took its name from the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, who managed the bill.
Q 06Which team agreed in December 1919 to buy Babe Ruth from Boston for $100,000, then a record for a ballplayer?
New York Yankees
The New York Yankees got the bargain of the century: Boston did not win another championship until 2004. Fans blamed the long drought on the Curse of the Bambino.
Q 07What was the fitting name of the colt that handed Man o' War his only defeat, at Saratoga in August 1919?
Upset
Upset won by a neck after the great champion got a bad start, the one loss in Man o' War's 21 races. Despite the legend, racing writers were already using the word that way in the 1870s.
Q 08Which soft drink did Roy Allen first sell at a June 1919 parade for returning war veterans in Lodi, California?
Root beer
Root beer from that roadside stand grew into the A&W brand after Allen took on a partner, Frank Wright, in 1922. The name simply joins the two men's initials.
Q 09Which future US president rode with a 1919 Army truck convoy that needed 62 days to cross America?
Dwight Eisenhower
Dwight Eisenhower, then a young officer, watched the trucks average under 6 mph from Washington to San Francisco. As president he made better highways a signature cause.
Q 10Onto a postcard of which famous painting did Marcel Duchamp pencil a moustache and goatee in 1919?
Mona Lisa
Mona Lisa got her whiskers on a cheap reproduction that Duchamp titled L.H.O.O.Q., letters that make a risqué pun when read aloud in French.
Q 11Which boxer floored Jess Willard seven times in round one to take the heavyweight title on 4 July 1919?
Jack Dempsey
Jack Dempsey, nicknamed the Manassa Mauler, kept the crown until 1926. The fight in Toledo, Ohio, set a record for gate money that he later smashed himself with boxing's first million-dollar gate.
Q 12Which NFL team, founded in 1919 by Curly Lambeau, is the only community-owned club in America's major leagues?
Green Bay Packers
The Green Bay Packers owe their name to Lambeau's employer, the Indian Packing Company. It gave him $500 for uniforms on condition that the team be named after its sponsor.
Q 13Which cartoon star first appeared, under the name Master Tom, in the silent short Feline Follies in November 1919?
Q 21Which American-born politician became the first woman to take a seat in Britain's House of Commons in 1919?
Nancy Astor
Nancy Astor won the Plymouth seat that her husband gave up when he inherited a peerage. Constance Markievicz had been elected a year earlier but never sat in the chamber.
Q 22In which Punjab city did troops under Reginald Dyer fire on a trapped crowd at Jallianwala Bagh in April 1919?
Amritsar
Amritsar was crowded for the Baisakhi fair when Dyer blocked the exit and ordered his men to shoot. Winston Churchill later condemned the attack in Parliament as monstrous.
Q 23Which German city gave its name to the republic whose 1919 constitution was drafted there, away from unrest in Berlin?
Weimar
Felix the Cat
Felix the Cat only received his famous name in his third cartoon, released a month later. The first short had been planned as a one-off.
Q 14Which masked avenger made his debut in Johnston McCulley's 1919 pulp serial The Curse of Capistrano?
Zorro
Zorro, whose name is Spanish for fox, was meant for a single story. A hit 1920 film starring Douglas Fairbanks convinced McCulley to keep writing him for about four decades.
Q 15Which natural wonder, a national monument since 1908, was made a US national park in February 1919?
Grand Canyon
The Grand Canyon had a long wait: the first attempt to make it a national park failed in 1882, and Senate bills in 1910 and 1911 were defeated as well.
Q 16Which athlete, born to Georgia sharecroppers in January 1919, broke baseball's colour line with Brooklyn in 1947?
Jackie Robinson
Jackie Robinson was raised in Pasadena, California, and at UCLA became the school's first athlete to earn varsity letters in four sports. Baseball was only one of them.
Q 17Which former US president died in his sleep at Sagamore Hill, his Long Island home, in January 1919?
Theodore Roosevelt
Theodore Roosevelt was only 60. The vice president of the day remarked that death had to catch him sleeping, because awake he would have put up a fight.
Q 18Which newspaper editor founded the Fasci Italiani di Combattimento at a meeting in Milan in March 1919?
Benito Mussolini
Benito Mussolini saw his new movement flop at first: in that November's Italian election none of its members won office. Three years later he was prime minister.
Q 19Which army informant, sent to report on the tiny German Workers' Party in Munich in 1919, ended up joining it?
Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler was enrolled as member number 555, although the party had begun its count at 500 to look bigger than it was. By 1921 he was its leader.
Q 20Which international body was created by a covenant written into the Treaty of Versailles, signed in June 1919?
League of Nations
The League of Nations was Woodrow Wilson's cherished project, yet his own country never joined it. The Senate refused to ratify the treaty that carried its founding charter.
Weimar was also picked for its symbolism: Friedrich Ebert wanted the Allies to think of the city of Goethe and Schiller while they settled the peace terms.
Q 24From which North Atlantic island did Alcock and Brown take off in June 1919 on the first non-stop transatlantic flight?
Newfoundland
Newfoundland's capital, St. John's, was the starting point. Their Vickers Vimy bomber ended up nose-down in an Irish bog that had looked from the air like a smooth, firm field.
Q 25Which pilot won the $25,000 prize that hotelier Raymond Orteig offered in 1919 for a non-stop flight to Paris?
Charles Lindbergh
Charles Lindbergh claimed the money in 1927, flying alone in the Spirit of St. Louis. Several famous aviators had tried and failed before the little-known American succeeded.
Q 26Which hotel chain began in 1919 when its founder bought the 40-room Mobley Hotel in Cisco, Texas?
Hilton
Hilton began almost by accident: Conrad Hilton had come to Texas at the height of the oil boom to buy a bank, and took the hotel when that deal fell through.
Q 27Which trophy went unawarded in 1919 after a flu outbreak forced the deciding game of the final to be cancelled?
The Stanley Cup
The Stanley Cup final between Montreal and Seattle stood level after five games when most of the Canadiens fell ill. Their defenceman Joe Hall died four days later.
Q 28Which symbol of the Tour de France was first worn in July 1919, by the race leader Eugène Christophe?
The yellow jersey
The yellow jersey embarrassed its first wearer: Christophe complained that spectators imitated canaries whenever he rode past.
Q 29What did the Nineteenth Amendment, passed by Congress in June 1919, set out to secure for American women?
The vote
The vote was not yet won when Congress acted: the states still had to ratify, and Tennessee's approval in August 1920 settled it.
Q 30At which Scottish naval anchorage did German sailors scuttle their own interned High Seas Fleet in June 1919?
Scapa Flow
Scapa Flow swallowed 52 of the 74 interned ships after Admiral Ludwig von Reuter gave the order. He feared the fleet would be seized by Britain or turned against Germany.