1929
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50 free 1929 trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Most people know 1929 for one week in October, when a decade of easy money ended on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. But the same twelve months also brought talking pictures into their own, a new sovereign state, a round-the-world airship voyage and a handful of cartoon characters who became household names. This quiz covers the whole year: the headlines and the gangland violence, the books and films people queued for, the songs on the radio, the sporting firsts, the everyday novelties that turned up in shops, and the future stars, leaders and champions who were born while it all happened. It is written for anyone born in 1929, for the families planning their birthday parties, and for anyone putting together a history round or a reunion game. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so the questions work as well read aloud to a room as played on a phone.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which comic character debuted in January 1929, nine years into E. C. Segar's strip Thimble Theatre?
Popeye
Popeye proved so popular that the strip was eventually renamed after him. His strength was first credited to spinach in 1931.
Q 02Which US president had been in office for under eight months when Wall Street crashed in October 1929?
Herbert Hoover
Herbert Hoover was sworn in on 4 March 1929 after beating Al Smith in a landslide. In 1932, with the Depression deepening, he lost in a landslide himself.
Q 03Which Chicago crime boss was widely blamed when seven men were shot in the 1929 St. Valentine's Day Massacre?
Al Capone
Al Capone was at his Florida home when the gunmen struck in a Lincoln Park garage. Two of the killers were disguised as police officers.
Q 04Which civil rights leader, born Michael in Atlanta in January 1929, was renamed by his father at the age of five?
Martin Luther King Jr.
Martin Luther King Jr. took the name of the German reformer Martin Luther. His father changed both their names in 1934, after a church trip that took him to Reformation sites in Germany.
Q 05Which diarist, born in Frankfurt in June 1929, got a checkered autograph book for her thirteenth birthday?
Anne Frank
Anne Frank began writing in it almost at once. Within a month her family had gone into hiding in a secret annex behind a bookcase in Amsterdam.
Q 06Which actress, born in Brussels in May 1929, shot to stardom opposite Gregory Peck in Roman Holiday?
Audrey Hepburn
Audrey Hepburn spent the war in the occupied Netherlands, studying ballet at the Arnhem Conservatory. By 1944 she was dancing to raise money for the resistance.
Q 07Which cartoon character spoke his first words on screen in 1929's The Karnival Kid, while selling hot dogs?
Mickey Mouse
Mickey Mouse had starred in eight earlier shorts without saying a word. The voice came from composer Carl Stalling, not from Walt Disney.
Q 08Which tiny independent state was created by the Lateran Treaty that Mussolini's Italy signed in February 1929?
Vatican City
Vatican City is the smallest country in the world by both area and population. The treaty settled the long-running Roman Question between Italy and the papacy.
Q 09Which annual Hollywood prizes were first handed out in May 1929, in a fifteen-minute ceremony at a private dinner?
The Oscars
The Oscars began before 270 guests at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. The winners had been announced three months earlier, so nobody was in suspense.
Q 10Which game did toy salesman Edwin Lowe spot at a Georgia carnival in December 1929, played with dried beans?
Bingo
Bingo was known as Beano when Lowe watched players cover numbers on cardboard sheets. He took the game home to New York and tried it on friends.
Q 11What nickname was given to 29 October 1929, when about 16 million shares changed hands on Wall Street?
Black Tuesday
Black Tuesday capped a week of panic selling. Leading bankers had clubbed together days earlier to buy stock above market value, which bought only a brief recovery.
Q 12Which rival of Joseph Stalin was expelled from the Soviet Union to Turkey in February 1929?
Leon Trotsky
Leon Trotsky was housed by the Turkish authorities on the island of Büyükada. He was murdered in Mexico City in 1940 by a Stalinist agent wielding an ice axe.
Q 13Which airship circled the globe in 21 days in August 1929, part-funded by publisher William Randolph Hearst?
Graf Zeppelin
Q 21Which director's 1929 thriller Blackmail began as a silent picture and was reworked into an early British talkie?
Alfred Hitchcock
Alfred Hitchcock had a casting problem: his star Anny Ondra had a pronounced Czech accent, so the actress Joan Barry supplied the character's voice.
Q 22Which comedy team filmed 1929's The Cocoanuts by day while performing Animal Crackers on stage at night?
The Marx Brothers
The Marx Brothers shot the film at Paramount's Astoria studio in New York and went on to the 44th Street Theatre each evening. Its plot sends up the Florida land boom.
Q 23Which song, later the title number of a 1952 film musical, was popularized by The Hollywood Revue of 1929?
Graf Zeppelin made the first round-the-world flight by an airship, starting and finishing at Lakehurst, New Jersey, because Hearst insisted on it. A crowd of perhaps 250,000 turned out in Tokyo.
Q 14Which remote spot did American explorer Richard Byrd reach by air in November 1929 in a Ford Trimotor?
South Pole
The South Pole flight nearly fell short: the crew had to dump empty fuel tanks and their emergency supplies to climb above the Antarctic Plateau.
Q 15Which aviator married Anne Morrow in May 1929, two years after flying solo from New York to Paris?
Charles Lindbergh
Charles Lindbergh wed the daughter of the US ambassador to Mexico at her family's New Jersey estate. She soon became the first woman in the United States to earn a glider pilot's licence.
Q 16Which lawman of the gunfight at the O.K. Corral died in Los Angeles in January 1929, aged 80?
Wyatt Earp
Wyatt Earp had worked as an unpaid consultant on silent cowboy movies and counted the screen cowboys William S. Hart and Tom Mix among his friends.
Q 17Which mould-derived substance did Alexander Fleming name in March 1929 and describe in a paper few people noticed?
Penicillin
Penicillin had been known around the lab as mould juice for months. It was 1940 before an Oxford team under Howard Florey and Ernst Chain isolated the purified compound.
Q 18Which name did King Alexander I give the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes in October 1929?
Yugoslavia
Yugoslavia means land of the South Slavs. Alexander imposed the name nine months after he had set up a royal dictatorship.
Q 19Which American astronomer confirmed in 1929 that the more distant a galaxy is, the faster it moves away?
Edwin Hubble
Edwin Hubble's result implies that the universe is expanding. The Belgian priest Georges Lemaître had proposed the same relationship two years earlier.
Q 20Which 1929 musical about a vaudeville sister act became the first sound film to win Best Picture?
The Broadway Melody
The Broadway Melody included an early Technicolor sequence that helped set off a rush of colour musicals. That sequence survives only in black and white.
Singin' in the Rain
Singin' in the Rain was performed in the revue by Cliff Edwards and the Brox Sisters, 23 years before the famous dance through the puddles.
Q 24Which author's 1929 novel A Farewell to Arms follows an American lieutenant in the Italian ambulance corps?
Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Hemingway had driven a Red Cross ambulance on the Italian front himself and was badly wounded by shrapnel in 1918. The book became his first best-seller.
Q 25Which German veteran wrote All Quiet on the Western Front, first published as a book in January 1929?
Erich Maria Remarque
Erich Maria Remarque later saw the novel and its sequel banned and burned in Nazi Germany. Hollywood's film version followed in 1930 and won Best Picture.
Q 26Which Mississippi novelist published The Sound and the Fury, the first story of the Compson family, in 1929?
William Faulkner
William Faulkner had Twilight as his working title. The book sold slowly until his later novel Sanctuary sent readers and critics back to it.
Q 27Which comic hero created by Belgian cartoonist Hergé travelled to the Soviet Union in his January 1929 debut?
Tintin
Tintin was sent there with his dog Snowy as a reporter for Le Petit Vingtième, the children's newspaper supplement that ran the strip as anti-communist satire.
Q 28Which Spanish painter co-wrote the 1929 surrealist film Un Chien Andalou with director Luis Buñuel?
Salvador Dalí
Salvador Dalí and Buñuel based the script on two of their dreams and kept one rule: nothing that could be explained rationally was allowed in.
Q 29Which New York institution opened in rented Fifth Avenue rooms in November 1929, nine days after the Wall Street crash?
Museum of Modern Art
The Museum of Modern Art was dreamed up by Abby Aldrich Rockefeller and two friends, Lillie Bliss and Mary Quinn Sullivan, who took modest quarters in the Heckscher Building.
Q 30Which New York Yankees slugger was handed uniform number 3 in 1929 because he batted third in the lineup?
Babe Ruth
Babe Ruth and his team-mates were numbered so that fans in cavernous Yankee Stadium could tell them apart. The Yankees were the first club to wear numbers both at home and away.