1920s and 1930s
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50 free 1920s and 1930s trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
The 1920s and 1930s sit side by side in the history books, but they could hardly feel more different. One decade roared with new money, new music and new freedoms; the next opened with a market crash and closed with the world sliding toward war. Between them they gave us talking pictures, household radio, transatlantic flight and some of the most famous faces of the century. This quiz covers both decades together: Prohibition and the gangsters it made rich, the Depression and the politics that followed, the films, books and songs people loved, the sporting heroes, the scientific breakthroughs and the everyday inventions that first turned up in shops and on streets. It is written for history fans, pub quiz and trivia night hosts, teachers building a lesson on the interwar years, and anyone planning a Roaring Twenties party or a decades round. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so the questions work read aloud as well as played on a phone.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which everyday food first went on sale in Chillicothe, Missouri, in July 1928?
Sliced bread
Sliced bread caught on so fast that by 1933 around 80% of the bread sold in the US came pre-sliced. An earlier prototype of Otto Rohwedder's slicing machine had been destroyed in a fire.
Q 02Which Chicago gang boss, nicknamed Scarface, was convicted of tax evasion in 1931?
Al Capone
Al Capone was convicted on five counts and sentenced to eleven years in federal prison. He loathed his nickname, which came from a knife attack that slashed his face three times.
Q 03Which cartoon character made his official debut in the 1928 sound short Steamboat Willie?
Mickey Mouse
Mickey Mouse had in fact been seen months earlier, in a test screening of Plane Crazy. Steamboat Willie was the first of his cartoons to be officially distributed.
Q 04Which pharaoh's tomb did Howard Carter's team discover in 1922, backed by the Earl of Carnarvon?
Tutankhamun
Tutankhamun was buried with over 5,000 artifacts, and the worldwide press coverage renewed public interest in ancient Egypt. He had died at about the age of 19.
Q 05Which antibiotic did physician Alexander Fleming discover in 1928, in an extract of a mould?
Penicillin
Penicillin was not purified until 1940, by an Oxford team led by Howard Florey and Ernst Chain. The two shared the 1945 Nobel Prize in Medicine with Fleming.
Q 06Which pilot flew the Spirit of St. Louis alone from New York to Paris in May 1927?
Charles Lindbergh
Charles Lindbergh was in the air for over 33 hours and won the $25,000 Orteig Prize. He navigated by dead reckoning, having rejected radio gear as heavy and unreliable.
Q 07Which world, found by Clyde Tombaugh in 1930, got its name from an eleven-year-old Oxford schoolgirl?
Pluto
Pluto was the idea of Venetia Burney, a girl with a keen interest in classical mythology. Tombaugh was just 23 when the observatory handed him the search for a ninth planet.
Q 08Which song, with words by Francis Scott Key, only became the official US national anthem in March 1931?
The Star-Spangled Banner
The Star-Spangled Banner sets an 1814 poem to the tune of a song written for a London gentlemen's club. Key wrote the words after watching the Royal Navy bombard Fort McHenry.
Q 09Which German passenger airship caught fire while docking at Lakehurst, New Jersey, in May 1937?
Hindenburg
Hindenburg was filled with hydrogen, and 35 of the 97 people on board died, along with one person on the ground. The publicity brought the age of the giant passenger airship to an abrupt end.
Q 10Which New York skyscraper opened in May 1931 after just thirteen and a half months of construction?
Empire State Building
The Empire State Building stayed the world's tallest building until the World Trade Center's North Tower was topped out in 1970. Two rival Manhattan towers were already going up when work on it began.
Q 11What were the illegal bars of Prohibition America, which largely vanished after 1933, commonly called?
Speakeasies
Speakeasies got the name because customers spoke quietly about them in public, so as not to alert the police or neighbors. The word was in use in America by the 1880s.
Q 12What name was given to the young women of the 1920s who bobbed their hair and wore knee-length skirts?
Flappers
Flappers flaunted their disdain for the era's codes of decent behavior. A skirt that reached the knee was considered short at the time.
Q 13Which 1925 F. Scott Fitzgerald novel follows a Long Island millionaire obsessed with Daisy Buchanan?
The Great Gatsby
Q 21Which 1927 Al Jolson film, the first feature with synchronized speech, signalled the end of silent cinema?
The Jazz Singer
The Jazz Singer was mostly silent, with synchronized singing and speech in only a few isolated sequences. Its star performs six songs.
Q 22Which subject was Tennessee teacher John T. Scopes put on trial for teaching in July 1925?
Evolution
Evolution could not legally be taught in Tennessee's public schools under a state law called the Butler Act. Scopes was fined $100, but the verdict was overturned on a technicality.
Q 23Which British king gave up the throne in December 1936 to marry American divorcée Wallis Simpson?
Edward VIII
The Great Gatsby was a commercial disappointment, selling fewer than 20,000 copies by that October. Fitzgerald drew on riotous parties he had attended on Long Island's North Shore.
Q 14Which New York Yankees slugger, sold by the Boston Red Sox, hit a record 60 home runs in 1927?
Babe Ruth
Babe Ruth began his major league career as a star left-handed pitcher before turning slugger. His 60 homers beat his own single-season record by one.
Q 15Which American aviator became the first woman to fly solo nonstop across the Atlantic in 1932?
Amelia Earhart
Amelia Earhart had first crossed the Atlantic in 1928 as a passenger. She vanished over the Pacific in 1937 while trying to become the first female pilot to circle the world.
Q 16Which American sprinter and long jumper won four gold medals at the 1936 Berlin Olympics?
Jesse Owens
Jesse Owens won the 100 meters, the 200 meters, the long jump and the sprint relay. The long jump world record he had set a year earlier stood until 1960.
Q 17What name was given to the drought-hit Great Plains of the 1930s, swept by storms called black blizzards?
The Dust Bowl
The Dust Bowl was named by an Associated Press editor rewriting a report on the storms of April 14, 1935, known as Black Sunday. Many farm families left for California.
Q 18Which US president explained his policies to Americans in evening radio talks known as fireside chats?
Franklin Roosevelt
Franklin Roosevelt gave the fireside chats between 1933 and 1944, using radio to quell rumors and answer hostile newspapers. They are preserved in the National Recording Registry.
Q 19Which US president, in office when the Depression began, had its shanty towns named after him?
Herbert Hoover
Herbert Hoover was widely blamed for the slump, so the camps built by the homeless became known as Hoovervilles. He lost the 1932 election in a landslide.
Q 20Which hormone did Frederick Banting and Charles Best first isolate at the University of Toronto in 1921?
Insulin
Insulin was first isolated from the pancreas of a dog. The 1923 Nobel Prize went to Banting and lab chief John Macleod, and Banting shared his prize money with Best.
Edward VIII was succeeded by his brother Albert, who reigned as George VI. Edward became Duke of Windsor and married Wallis the following year.
Q 24Whose 1938 radio version of The War of the Worlds convinced some listeners that Martians were invading?
Orson Welles
Orson Welles directed and narrated the broadcast as a Halloween episode of The Mercury Theatre on the Air. It was adapted from the novel by H. G. Wells and went out live on CBS.
Q 25Which Indian leader walked 240 miles to the sea in 1930 to protest the British tax on salt?
Mahatma Gandhi
Mahatma Gandhi set out from Sabarmati Ashram and reached the coastal village of Dandi after 24 days. The march was a campaign of tax resistance and nonviolent protest.
Q 26Which British author introduced the detective Hercule Poirot in her first novel, published in 1920?
Agatha Christie
Agatha Christie wrote The Mysterious Affair at Styles in 1916, in the middle of the First World War. It came out in the United States before it appeared in Britain.
Q 27Which 1936 novel about Scarlett O'Hara was the only one Margaret Mitchell published in her lifetime?
Gone with the Wind
Gone with the Wind won Mitchell the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1937. Its heroine is the spoiled eldest daughter of a plantation owner, left to claw her way out of poverty.
Q 28Which New Orleans-born trumpeter and vocalist, nicknamed Satchmo, rose to fame in the 1920s?
Louis Armstrong
Louis Armstrong shifted the focus of jazz from collective improvisation to the solo performer. He first made his name on the cornet as well as the trumpet.
Q 29Which Yankee, known as the Iron Horse, played 2,130 straight games before illness stopped him in 1939?
Lou Gehrig
Lou Gehrig took himself out of the lineup on May 2, 1939, with what proved to be the incurable illness ALS. His record stood for 56 years, until Cal Ripken Jr. passed it in 1995.
Q 30Which South Dakota monument did sculptor Gutzon Borglum begin carving into the Black Hills in 1927?
Mount Rushmore
Mount Rushmore was chosen partly because it faces southeast and catches the most sunlight. Borglum named the work the Shrine of Democracy and ran it until 1941 with the help of his son.