1948
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50 free 1948 trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Three years after the Second World War ended, 1948 was a year of rebuilding and of new dividing lines. Old empires were giving way to new nations, the Cold War was hardening, and an American election produced one of the most famous front pages in newspaper history. This quiz covers the whole year: world events and leaders, science and invention, the brands and products that first appeared, the films, songs and broadcasts people enjoyed, the big moments in sport, and the well-known names who were born in those twelve months. It is written for anyone born in 1948, anyone who remembers it, and anyone planning a milestone birthday party, a reunion or a family game night. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so you can play it straight through or print it for a group.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which newspaper ran the mistaken headline 'Dewey Defeats Truman' after the 1948 US presidential election?
Chicago Daily Tribune
The Chicago Daily Tribune went to press early because its printers were on strike, before most states had reported. A grinning Truman held a copy aloft at St. Louis Union Station.
Q 02Which independence leader was shot by Nathuram Godse on his way to a New Delhi prayer meeting in January 1948?
Mahatma Gandhi
Mahatma Gandhi was 78 and walking to his evening multi-faith prayers at Birla House when three bullets struck him at point-blank range. The mansion is now a memorial.
Q 03Which company's instant camera, invented by Edwin Land, first went on sale in a Boston store in November 1948?
Polaroid
Polaroid put 57 of its Land Cameras on sale at Jordan Marsh before Christmas. Each could take and develop a picture in a minute or less.
Q 04Which country declared independence on 14 May 1948, hours before a British Mandate expired at midnight?
Israel
Israel was proclaimed by David Ben-Gurion at the Tel Aviv Museum that afternoon. The United States recognised the new state eleven minutes after midnight.
Q 05Which baseball legend, nicknamed the Sultan of Swat, died of cancer in New York in August 1948, aged 53?
Babe Ruth
Babe Ruth lay in an open casket at Yankee Stadium for two days while thousands of fans filed past. The Yankees had retired his number 3 that same year.
Q 06Which motorsport body did Bill France Sr. found in February 1948 after meetings at Daytona Beach's Streamline Hotel?
NASCAR
NASCAR traces its roots to Prohibition-era moonshine runners, who began racing one another for pride. The founding talks started in the hotel's Ebony Bar.
Q 07Which word game got its lasting name in 1948, when James Brunot bought the rights from its architect inventor?
Scrabble
Scrabble had been sold as Criss-Crosswords, and its new name is a real word meaning to scratch frantically. Parker Brothers was among the big makers that had turned the game down.
Q 08Which blockaded city did American and British planes keep supplied with food and coal from June 1948?
Berlin
Berlin's children got sweets too: pilot Gail Halvorsen dropped chocolate bars on handkerchief parachutes, and thank-you mail soon arrived for 'The Chocolate Flier'.
Q 09Which burger chain's founding brothers rebuilt their San Bernardino drive-in around a nine-item menu in 1948?
McDonald's
McDonald's fired its 20 carhops and swapped plates for paper wrappers, selling 15-cent hamburgers from a walk-up window. The method became known as the Speedee Service System.
Q 10Which city hosted the 1948 Olympics, nicknamed the Austerity Games because of post-war rationing?
London
London built no new venues and housed athletes in existing accommodation instead of an Olympic Village. Germany and Japan were not invited.
Q 11Which Black Sabbath frontman, dubbed the Prince of Darkness, was born in December 1948 and raised in Aston, Birmingham?
Ozzy Osbourne
Ozzy Osbourne sang on the band's first eight studio albums before being sacked in 1979 over his drinking and drug use. He went on to sell more than 100 million albums.
Q 12Which Fleetwood Mac singer, writer of 'Dreams' and 'Landslide', was born in Phoenix, Arizona, in May 1948?
Stevie Nicks
Stevie Nicks became the first woman inducted twice into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, with the band in 1998 and as a solo artist in 2019.
Q 13Which Pulp Fiction star, born in Washington, D.C., in December 1948, grew up in Chattanooga, Tennessee?
Samuel L. Jackson
Q 21Which actor played the gold prospector Fred C. Dobbs in the 1948 film The Treasure of the Sierra Madre?
Humphrey Bogart
Humphrey Bogart was directed by John Huston, whose father Walter co-starred. It was the first time a father and son both won Oscars for the same film.
Q 22Which Laurence Olivier film of 1948 was the first British production to win the Best Picture Oscar?
Hamlet
Hamlet also won Olivier the Best Actor award, though purists complained that he had cut an hour and a half from Shakespeare's four-hour play.
Q 23Which New York entertainment columnist began hosting the CBS variety show Toast of the Town in June 1948?
Ed Sullivan
Samuel L. Jackson served as an usher at Martin Luther King Jr.'s funeral in Atlanta in 1968. A year later he helped hold his college's trustees hostage to demand reforms.
Q 14Which US vice president, later a Nobel Peace Prize winner for climate activism, was born in March 1948?
Al Gore
Al Gore shared the 2007 prize with the IPCC for his work on climate change. A politician's son, he was raised between Tennessee and Washington, D.C.
Q 15Which composer of Cats and The Phantom of the Opera was born in March 1948 to an organist father and violinist mother?
Andrew Lloyd Webber
Andrew Lloyd Webber was playing piano and violin at three and composing by the age of six. At nine he wrote a suite of six pieces.
Q 16Which 'Hot Stuff' singer, known as the Queen of Disco, was born in Boston on New Year's Eve 1948?
Donna Summer
Donna Summer left for Munich in 1968 to join the German production of the musical Hair. She spent several years living, acting and singing there before disco made her a star.
Q 17Which country's National Party, led by cleric D. F. Malan, ousted wartime leader Jan Smuts in a May 1948 election?
South Africa
South Africa's nationalists called their programme apartheid and went on to rule for 46 years. The party Smuts led had won just under half of the votes cast.
Q 18Which author finished the manuscript of the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four on the Scottish island of Jura in late 1948?
George Orwell
George Orwell posted the finished manuscript to his publisher on 4 December 1948 and left his remote farmhouse for good a month later. The book came out the following June.
Q 19In which European city did the UN adopt the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in December 1948?
Paris
Paris hosted that session of the General Assembly at the Palais de Chaillot. Eleanor Roosevelt chaired the committee that drafted the text.
Q 20Which 1948 Hitchcock thriller, starring James Stewart, was edited to look like just four long unbroken shots?
Rope
Rope was the director's first Technicolor film and plays out in real time. Stewart found the shoot exasperating, complaining that the camera was being rehearsed, not the actors.
Ed Sullivan's first broadcast featured Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, plus Rodgers and Hammerstein previewing their next musical. The show ran until 1971.
Q 24Which aviation pioneer, who flew at Kitty Hawk in 1903, died in January 1948, decades after his brother and partner?
Orville Wright
Orville Wright's executors sold the original Flyer to the Smithsonian for one dollar later that year. It had spent years on loan to a museum in Britain.
Q 25Which European aid programme, proposed at Harvard by a US Secretary of State, became law in April 1948?
Marshall Plan
The Marshall Plan was offered to the Soviet Union and its allies as well, but they refused it under Soviet pressure. Moscow launched its own rival scheme instead.
Q 26Which former Soviet Red Army officer became North Korea's first premier in September 1948?
Kim Il Sung
Kim Il Sung had landed at the port of Wonsan in 1945 after 26 years in exile. The Soviet Union designated him premier on 9 September.
Q 27Which Central American country abolished its army in December 1948 after a brief civil war?
Costa Rica
Costa Rica's rebel leader José Figueres Ferrer said he was inspired to disarm by 'The Outline of History', a book he had read as a student at MIT.
Q 28Which wartime prime minister of Japan was hanged in December 1948 after the Tokyo war crimes trials?
Hideki Tojo
Hideki Tojo had shot himself in the chest when American soldiers surrounded his house in 1945. He missed his heart and was resuscitated by the troops sent to arrest him.
Q 29At which royal residence was the future King Charles III born by caesarean section in November 1948?
Buckingham Palace
Buckingham Palace was also where he was christened a month later, in the Music Room. He was the first child of the future Queen Elizabeth II.
Q 30Which team won the 1948 World Series in six games, with 42-year-old rookie Satchel Paige on its pitching staff?
Cleveland Indians
The Cleveland Indians got there by beating the Red Sox in a one-game playoff for the pennant, which spoiled the chance of an all-Boston World Series.