1920s Trivia
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This 1920s trivia quiz has 236 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 236 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 Eighteenth Amendment was ratified on January 16, 1919 and took effect one year later, on January 17, 1920; Connecticut and Rhode Island were the only states that 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
The Volstead Act, named for Minnesota congressman Andrew Volstead, became law in October 1919 when Congress overrode Woodrow Wilson's veto; it defined 'intoxicating' as anything over 0.5 percent alcohol.
Q 03By 1925, roughly how many speakeasies were estimated to be operating in New York City alone?
30,000 to 100,000
Estimates for New York City by 1925 ranged from 30,000 to 100,000 speakeasies; police commissioner Grover Whalen put the figure at 32,000 in 1929.
Q 04Al Capone was finally sent to prison in 1931 for what crime?
Tax evasion
Capone was convicted of tax evasion in October 1931 and sentenced to eleven years; he served part of it at the new federal penitentiary on Alcatraz from 1934.
Q 05How many men were killed in the Saint Valentine's Day Massacre of 1929?
Seven
Seven men were lined up against a garage wall at 2122 North Clark Street and shot on February 14, 1929; two gunmen wore police uniforms, and target Bugs Moran had not yet arrived.
Q 06Which state's narrow vote in August 1920 provided the 36th ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment?
Tennessee
Tennessee's House approved ratification 50–46 on August 18, 1920 after 24-year-old Harry Burn switched his vote at his mother's urging; the amendment was certified on August 26, now Women's Equality Day.
Q 07Warren G. Harding's winning 1920 campaign slogan promised a 'return to' what?
Normalcy
Harding's 'return to normalcy' line came from a May 1920 Boston speech; he then ran a front-porch campaign from Marion, Ohio, where some 600,000 visitors came to hear him.
Q 08Who 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 09Coolidge's dry, taciturn manner earned him what nickname?
Silent Cal
'Silent Cal' was also the only US president born on the Fourth of July, and he bowed out of the 1928 race with the terse line 'I do not choose to run.'
Q 10In which small town, chosen deliberately to attract publicity, was the 1925 Scopes 'monkey trial' staged?
Dayton
Dayton, Tennessee's boosters recruited substitute teacher John Scopes to test the Butler Act for the publicity; the jury took nine minutes to convict him, and the $100 fine was later overturned on a technicality.
Q 11Which 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 12How long was Charles Lindbergh alone in the air on his May 1927 flight from New York to Paris?
Over 33 hours
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 13Which magazine named Lindbergh its first-ever 'Man of the Year' for 1927?
Time
Time magazine put Lindbergh on its January 2, 1928 cover as the first 'Man of the Year'; at 25 he remained the youngest honoree until 16-year-old Greta Thunberg in 2019.
Q 21In which year did Ford stop building the Model T and introduce the Model A?
1927
The last Model T left the line in May 1927 after nearly two decades of production, and the Model A went on sale that December with a laminated safety-glass windshield as standard.
Q 22October 29, 1929, when 16 million shares changed hands and $14 billion evaporated, is remembered as what?
Black Tuesday
Black Tuesday, October 29, 1929, followed Black Thursday's panic five days earlier; the Dow kept sliding until July 1932, by which time it had lost about 89 percent of its 1929 peak.
Q 23At what rate did Germany's new Rentenmark replace the paper mark at the end of 1923?
One to one trillion paper marks
Q 14In 1928 Amelia Earhart became the first woman to cross the Atlantic by air - in what role?
As a passenger
Earhart rode as a passenger on the Friendship in June 1928 while Wilmer Stultz flew and Lou Gordon served as mechanic; heiress Amy Phipps Guest financed the flight, and Earhart's own solo crossing came in 1932.
Q 15When Carnarvon asked 'Can you see anything?' at Tutankhamun's tomb in 1922, what did Howard Carter reply?
'Yes, wonderful things!'
Carter's published account gives 'Yes, wonderful things!' as his reply on November 26, 1922; his diary entry that day recorded only the plainer 'Yes, it is wonderful.'
Q 16Banting and Best first extracted insulin at the university of which Canadian city, which then got the patent for one dollar?
Toronto
Toronto's Frederick Banting split his 1923 Nobel money with Charles Best, furious that the prize committee had left Best out in favour of John Macleod.
Q 17How 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 18Who discovered penicillin in 1928 in his laboratory at St Mary's Hospital, London?
Alexander Fleming
Alexander Fleming did not even coin the word 'penicillin' until March 1929, to avoid repeating 'mould broth filtrate'; a purified drug took until 1940.
Q 19The Jazz Singer, the 1927 film that ended the era of the silents, used which sound-on-disc system?
Vitaphone
Vitaphone's discs carried Al Jolson's ad-lib 'Wait a minute, wait a minute. You ain't heard nothin' yet!', later voted one of the AFI's top 100 movie quotes.
Q 20How many home runs did Babe Ruth hit in 1927 to set a single-season record that stood for 34 years?
60
Ruth's 60th came on September 30 off Tom Zachary, for a Yankees lineup nicknamed 'Murderers' Row'; Roger Maris finally passed it in 1961.
The Rentenmark, introduced on November 15, 1923, was set at one to one trillion paper marks; the Dawes Plan of 1924 then restructured Germany's reparations.
Q 24Roughly how many copies had The Great Gatsby sold by October 1925, six months after publication?
Fewer than 20,000
The Great Gatsby sold fewer than 20,000 copies by October 1925; Scribner's second printing of 3,000 had not sold out when Fitzgerald died in 1940 believing his work forgotten.
Q 25In The Great Gatsby, Nick Carraway rents a bungalow in which fictional Long Island village, next to Gatsby's mansion?
West Egg
West Egg is the new-money side of the bay; the Buchanans live across the water in old-money East Egg. Nick, a Yale man and war veteran, has come east to sell bonds.
Q 26'The Charleston' craze came from a 1923 James P. Johnson tune in which Broadway show?
Runnin' Wild
'The Charleston' was introduced in Runnin' Wild, the 1923 Broadway revue by Flournoy Miller and Aubrey Lyles; Johnson said he had seen the steps danced by South Carolina dockworkers in New York years earlier.
Q 27Which actress starred in 'The Flapper' (1920), the first American film about flapper life?
Olive Thomas
Olive Thomas played the title role in The Flapper, written by Frances Marion and released in May 1920; Thomas died in Paris that September after swallowing mercury bichloride.
Q 28Which 1925 anthology edited by Alain Locke is considered the cornerstone of the Harlem Renaissance?
The New Negro
The New Negro featured Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes and Claude McKay alongside lesser-known poets such as Anne Spencer.
Q 29Louis Armstrong helped popularize scat singing with which 1926 Hot Five recording?
'Heebie Jeebies'
'Heebie Jeebies', cut by the Hot Five for Okeh in February 1926, made scat famous; legend says Armstrong improvised syllables after dropping the lyric sheet, though he was not the first to record scat.
Q 30Duke Ellington's orchestra became famous through its residency at which Harlem nightclub from 1927?
The Cotton Club
The Cotton Club booking had been turned down first by King Oliver; Ellington had to expand from six to eleven players just to audition.