1939
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50 free 1939 trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Few years packed in as much as 1939. It began with a world's fair promising a bright tomorrow and ended with Europe at war, and in between Hollywood turned out more lasting classics in twelve months than it usually manages in a decade. This quiz walks through the whole year: the leaders, invasions and treaties that filled the front pages, the inventions and household names that first appeared, the films, big-band records and novels people queued for, the great moments in sport, and the future stars who were born while all of it was going on. It suits anyone born in 1939, anyone with a parent or grandparent who was, and anyone putting together a milestone birthday, a reunion or a history-themed game night. Each answer has a short explanation, so the questions work equally well played on screen or printed out and read aloud to a room.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which American picnic food did President Roosevelt serve King George VI at his Hyde Park estate in June 1939?
Hot dogs
Hot dogs shared the table with smoked turkey and strawberry shortcake. The royal couple had toured the New York World's Fair only the day before.
Q 02Which American holiday did President Roosevelt move a week earlier in 1939 to lengthen the Christmas shopping season?
Thanksgiving
Thanksgiving ended up on two dates: 23 states took the new one, 22 kept the old and critics mocked the change as Franksgiving. Congress fixed the fourth Thursday of November in 1941.
Q 03Which superhero, created by Bob Kane and Bill Finger, debuted in the 27th issue of Detective Comics in 1939?
Batman
Batman gained his cowl, cape, gloves and darker costume at Finger's suggestion. Detective Comics went on to become the longest-running comic book in the United States.
Q 04Which Christmas character first appeared in a 1939 giveaway booklet that Robert L. May wrote for Montgomery Ward?
Rudolph
Rudolph was a money-saver: Montgomery Ward had been buying Christmas booklets to give away and decided to create its own. It handed out 2.4 million copies in the first year.
Q 05Which actress became the first African American to win an Oscar, for playing Mammy in 1939's Gone with the Wind?
Hattie McDaniel
Hattie McDaniel accepted the award at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, where she was seated at a segregated table at the side of the room.
Q 06Which New York Yankees first baseman ended his streak of 2,130 consecutive games in May 1939, shortly before retiring?
Lou Gehrig
Lou Gehrig's record stood for 56 years, until Cal Ripken Jr. passed it in 1995. In June 1939 he was diagnosed with ALS, the illness many Americans still know by his name.
Q 07Which DuPont synthetic fiber went on show as women's stockings at the 1939 New York World's Fair?
Nylon
Nylon had first been sold a year earlier as toothbrush bristles. When the stockings reached shops across America in 1940, 64 million pairs sold in the first year.
Q 08Which physicist signed an August 1939 letter warning President Roosevelt that Germany might build an atomic bomb?
Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein only signed the letter, which was written by Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard. Roosevelt responded by setting up the Advisory Committee on Uranium.
Q 09Which singer, later dubbed the Queen of Rock 'n' Roll, was born Anna Mae Bullock in Tennessee in November 1939?
Tina Turner
Tina Turner grew up in the rural community of Nutbush, the place behind the Ike & Tina Turner hit Nutbush City Limits.
Q 10Which country did Germany invade on 1 September 1939, the attack that began the Second World War in Europe?
Poland
Poland was attacked again sixteen days later, when the Soviet Union invaded from the east. Britain and France had declared war on Germany on 3 September.
Q 11Which British prime minister told the nation by radio on 3 September 1939 that it was at war with Germany?
Chamberlain
Chamberlain led Britain through only the first eight months of the war, resigning on 10 May 1940. He died of cancer six months after leaving office.
Q 12Which Nordic country did the Soviet Union invade on 30 November 1939, starting the three-month Winter War?
Finland
Finland gave up 9% of its territory in the peace treaty of March 1940 but kept its independence. The attack got the Soviet Union expelled from the League of Nations.
Q 13Which general declared victory in the Spanish Civil War on 1 April 1939 after his forces entered Madrid?
Francisco Franco
Q 21Which jazz singer recorded the anti-lynching song Strange Fruit for the small Commodore label in April 1939?
Billie Holiday
Billie Holiday turned to Commodore because her producers at Columbia found the subject too sensitive. She was introduced to the song by the owner of Café Society, an integrated New York nightclub.
Q 22Which bandleader released his signature tune Moonlight Serenade in May 1939 and recorded In the Mood the same year?
Glenn Miller
Glenn Miller led the best-selling recording band of the years 1939 to 1942. His 1939 recording of In the Mood was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1983.
Q 23Which Hoboken-born singer joined the Harry James band in 1939 and released his first commercial record that July?
Francisco Franco went on to rule Spain for 36 years, until his death in 1975 at the age of 82.
Q 14Which Southeast Asian kingdom, known to the world as Siam, officially changed its name in June 1939?
Thailand
Thailand had become a constitutional monarchy only seven years earlier, when the revolution of 1932 ended absolute royal rule.
Q 15Which actress, sixteen during filming, played Dorothy Gale in the 1939 musical The Wizard of Oz?
Judy Garland
Judy Garland's work in 1939 brought her the only Academy Award of her career, a Juvenile Award for The Wizard of Oz and Babes in Arms.
Q 16Which B-movie actor did the director of the 1939 Western Stagecoach insist on casting as the Ringo Kid?
John Wayne
John Wayne was one reason several studios turned the project down, but director John Ford held firm. Stagecoach was also the first of many Westerns Ford shot in Monument Valley.
Q 17Which actor played the naive senator who stages a filibuster in Frank Capra's 1939 film Mr. Smith Goes to Washington?
James Stewart
James Stewart took a part first meant for Gary Cooper: the film was planned as a sequel called Mr. Deeds Goes to Washington. It won him the New York Film Critics Circle Award.
Q 18Which fictional detective did Basil Rathbone first play in 1939, beginning a run of fourteen films with Nigel Bruce?
Sherlock Holmes
Sherlock Holmes first appeared with Rathbone in The Hound of the Baskervilles, released by 20th Century Fox. Nigel Bruce played Dr. Watson throughout the series, which ran until 1946.
Q 19Which American aviator was declared legally dead in January 1939, eighteen months after vanishing over the Pacific?
Amelia Earhart
Amelia Earhart's husband, George Putnam, asked a Los Angeles court to waive the usual seven-year wait so he could manage her finances. She had been trying to fly around the world.
Q 20In which Southern city did Gone with the Wind have its premiere in December 1939, drawing a crowd of about 300,000?
Atlanta
Atlanta's premiere capped three days of festivities, and Georgia's governor declared the day a state holiday. The film's Black cast members were kept away by Jim Crow laws.
Frank Sinatra
Frank Sinatra signed with Columbia Records four years later and became the idol of the teenage fans known as bobby soxers.
Q 24Which author's 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath follows the Joad family from Dust Bowl Oklahoma to California?
John Steinbeck
John Steinbeck saw the novel publicly banned and burned by citizens, yet it won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. It was cited again when he received the Nobel Prize in 1962.
Q 25Which crime writer set her 1939 mystery And Then There Were None on an isolated island off the Devon coast?
Agatha Christie
Agatha Christie's island puzzle became the world's best-selling mystery novel, with more than 100 million copies sold.
Q 26Which 1939 picture book by Ludwig Bemelmans follows a girl at a Paris boarding school who has her appendix removed?
Madeline
Madeline was the first of six books by Bemelmans, a series his grandson later extended to 17.
Q 27Which village in upstate New York became home to the National Baseball Hall of Fame, dedicated in June 1939?
Cooperstown
Cooperstown owed the honor to a myth that Abner Doubleday invented baseball there in the 1830s. The building was paid for by Stephen Clark, an heir to the Singer sewing machine fortune.
Q 28Which type of aircraft did Igor Sikorsky test fly in September 1939 in the shape of his experimental VS-300?
Helicopter
Helicopter flight began cautiously: the VS-300 stayed tethered by cables that day, and its first free flight came in May 1940.
Q 29Which co-founder of the comedy troupe Monty Python was born in Weston-super-Mare, Somerset, in October 1939?
John Cleese
John Cleese might have been John Cheese: his father thought the family surname embarrassing and changed it when he enlisted in the Army during the First World War.
Q 30Which future director of The Godfather and Apocalypse Now was born in Detroit, Michigan, in April 1939?
Coppola
Francis Ford Coppola owes his middle name to his birthplace, Henry Ford Hospital. His father Carmine was a flautist with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra.