This 1920s trivia quiz has 190 free questions with answers and covers the whole Roaring Twenties, not just the flapper dresses. It opens with the big American story - Prohibition and the Volstead Act, the speakeasies, Al Capone and the Saint Valentine's Day Massacre - then moves through women's suffrage, the Harding scandals, Silent Cal's kerosene-lamp swearing-in, the Scopes 'monkey trial' and the crash of October 1929. There is science and culture too: the discovery of insulin and penicillin, Tutankhamun's tomb, Lindbergh's 33 hours over the Atlantic, the first talkie, Babe Ruth's 60 home runs, The Great Gatsby, Winnie-the-Pooh, Mickey Mouse, the Charleston, the Harlem Renaissance and the first Winter Olympics - plus a look abroad at Weimar Germany's hyperinflation, Mussolini and the Irish Free State. About a third of the questions are easy warm-ups; the rest climb toward the kind of detail only a Jazz Age obsessive would know. Every answer has been checked against Wikipedia and the primary sources it cites, and each explanation adds one more thing worth knowing.
30 of 190 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01On what date did the United States officially go 'dry' under the Eighteenth Amendment?
January 17, 1920
The amendment was ratified a year earlier but built in a twelve-month grace period; only Connecticut and Rhode Island never ratified it.
Q 02What was the popular name of the 1919 law that defined 'intoxicating liquors' and set penalties for making them?
The Volstead Act
Congress passed it over Woodrow Wilson's veto, then never gave the government the money to enforce it.
Q 03By 1925, roughly how many speakeasies were estimated to be operating in New York City alone?
30,000 to 100,000
Prohibition ended in December 1933 with the Twenty-first Amendment, the only amendment ever passed to repeal another one.
Q 04Al Capone was finally sent to prison in 1931 for what crime?
Tax evasion
He was sentenced to more than a decade and later shipped to the newly opened Alcatraz; the tax strategy against gangsters was reportedly the idea of Assistant Attorney General Mabel Walker Willebrandt.
Q 05How many men were killed in the Saint Valentine's Day Massacre of 1929?
Seven
Two of the gunmen were dressed as police officers; the intended target, 'Bugs' Moran, had not yet arrived at the garage.
Q 06Which state's narrow vote in August 1920 provided the 36th ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment?
Tennessee
The vote in the state House was 50 of 99 members; the amendment's adoption was formally certified on August 26, now Women's Equality Day.
Q 07Warren G. Harding's winning 1920 campaign slogan promised a 'return to' what?
Normalcy
He ran a 'front porch campaign' that brought 600,000 voters to his home in Marion, Ohio, where he had built the local newspaper into a success.
Q 08The Teapot Dome scandal involved bribes for leases on government oil reserves in which state?
Wyoming
Interior Secretary Albert Fall became the first presidential cabinet member ever sent to prison, though nobody was convicted of paying the bribes.
Q 09Who swore in Harding's successor by kerosene lamp in a Vermont farmhouse in 1923?
The new president's father
The family homestead had neither electricity nor a telephone; his father was a notary public and justice of the peace, and the new president went back to bed afterward.
Q 10Coolidge's dry, taciturn manner earned him what nickname?
Silent Cal
He is also the only US president born on the Fourth of July, and he declined to run again in 1928 with the terse line 'I do not choose to run.'
Q 11In which small town, chosen deliberately to attract publicity, was the 1925 Scopes 'monkey trial' staged?
Dayton
John Scopes had only been substituting for the regular biology teacher; the jury took nine minutes to convict and he was fined $100.
Q 12Which three-time presidential candidate argued for the prosecution at the Scopes trial?
William Jennings Bryan
Darrow famously called Bryan himself to the stand as an expert on the Bible; Bryan died a few days after the trial ended.
Q 13How long was Charles Lindbergh alone in the air on his May 1927 flight from New York to Paris?
Over 33 hours
Q 21The Jazz Singer, the 1927 film that ended the era of the silents, used which sound-on-disc system?
Vitaphone
Al Jolson's ad-lib 'Wait a minute, wait a minute. You ain't heard nothin' yet!' was later voted one of the AFI's top 100 movie quotes.
Q 22How many home runs did Babe Ruth hit in 1927 to set a single-season record that stood for 34 years?
60
The record-setter came on September 30 off Tom Zachary; that Yankees lineup was nicknamed 'Murderers' Row'.
Q 23In which year did Ford stop building the Model T and introduce the Model A?
1927
The Model T had run for 18 years; the new car was one of the first production cars with safety glass in the windshield.
He was chasing the $25,000 Orteig Prize; two French aviators, Nungesser and Coli, had vanished trying the same route in the other direction two weeks earlier.
Q 14Which magazine named Lindbergh its first-ever 'Man of the Year' for 1927?
Time
Hoover put him on the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics in 1929 and Congress gave him a Gold Medal in 1930.
Q 15In 1928 Amelia Earhart became the first woman to cross the Atlantic by air - in what role?
As a passenger
Heiress Amy Phipps Guest financed the flight and hired pilot Wilmer Stultz; Earhart's own solo crossing came in 1932.
Q 16When Carnarvon asked 'Can you see anything?' at Tutankhamun's tomb in 1922, what did Howard Carter reply?
'Yes, wonderful things!'
Carter's own diary that day recorded the less quotable 'Yes, it is wonderful'; the tomb was designated KV62.
Q 17Lord Carnarvon's death in April 1923 fed rumours of a pharaoh's curse. What actually killed him?
An infection
The media frenzy was dubbed 'Tutmania' and set off a craze for Egyptian motifs in Western design.
Q 18Which city's university first extracted insulin, then got the patent for one dollar?
Toronto
Banting and Macleod won the 1923 Nobel Prize; Banting was so angry that Charles Best was left out that he split his prize money with him.
Q 19How old was Leonard Thompson, the diabetic given the first insulin injection in 1922?
14
The first dose was so impure it caused a severe allergic reaction; James Collip spent twelve days purifying it before a second, successful shot.
Q 20Which Scottish physician discovered penicillin in 1928?
Alexander Fleming
He only coined the word 'penicillin' in March 1929 to avoid repeating 'mould broth filtrate'; the purified drug did not arrive until 1940.
Q 24October 29, 1929, when 16 million shares changed hands and $14 billion evaporated, is remembered as what?
Black Tuesday
Black Thursday came five days earlier with a then-record 12.9 million shares; the market kept sliding until July 1932, down about 90%.
Q 25Germany ended its 1923 hyperinflation with a new currency, the Rentenmark. What was the exchange rate?
One to one trillion paper marks
Berlin's clubs were full of speculators spending their daily profits before the money lost value overnight; the Dawes Plan then restructured reparations.
Q 26The Great Gatsby was published in 1925. Roughly how many copies had it sold by that October?
Fewer than 20,000
Fitzgerald considered it a commercial flop and died in 1940 believing his work forgotten; the novel is set on Long Island in 1922.
Q 27In The Great Gatsby, Nick Carraway rents a bungalow in which fictional Long Island village, next to Gatsby?
West Egg
Nick is a Yale alumnus and World War I veteran who has come to New York to sell bonds.
Q 28'The Charleston' craze came from a 1923 James P. Johnson tune in which Broadway show?
Runnin' Wild
Johnson said he had seen the dance done in New York's San Juan Hill neighbourhood as early as 1913; its peak popularity came in 1926-27.
Q 29Which actress starred in 'The Flapper' (1920), the first American film about flapper life?
Olive Thomas
The word itself may come from northern English slang for a teenage girl whose plaited ponytail 'flapped' on her back.
Q 30Which 1925 anthology edited by Alain Locke is considered the cornerstone of the Harlem Renaissance?
The New Negro
It featured Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes and Claude McKay alongside lesser-known poets such as Anne Spencer.