Louisiana Trivia
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This Louisiana trivia quiz has 99 free questions with answers and covers the whole state, not just the French Quarter. It runs from the Louisiana Purchase, statehood and the Battle of New Orleans through Huey Long, Reconstruction, Bonnie and Clyde's last stand in Bienville Parish and Hurricane Katrina, then out into the geography that makes the state strange and wonderful: 64 parishes instead of counties, a 535-foot 'mountain', the Atchafalaya, a 24-mile bridge and a coast that loses land every day. Culture and food get their due too: Cajun and Creole roots, zydeco, the origins of gumbo, jambalaya, po' boys and Tabasco, plus the Saints, LSU's Death Valley, the Bayou Classic and famous Louisianans from Louis Armstrong to Britney Spears. Questions range from easy ones any Louisianan can answer to expert-level details about the Chinese Bandits and Saint Malo. Every answer has been checked against Wikipedia or a primary source, and each question links to the page that confirms it. New Orleans and Mardi Gras have their own dedicated quizzes, so this one keeps the focus on the state as a whole.
30 of 99 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01New Orleans is Louisiana's largest city, but which is its capital?
Baton Rouge
Baton Rouge took over as capital in 1849, lost the job when Union forces captured the city during the Civil War, and did not get the government back until 1882.
Q 02Louisiana is the only U.S. state whose county-equivalent subdivisions are called what?
parishes
Parishes are a holdover from colonial days: the colony was officially Catholic and ran local affairs through church parishes, and the name outlasted the empires that drew them.
Q 03La Salle named Louisiana in 1682 in honor of which reigning French king?
Louis XIV
Louis XIV got the honor when La Salle claimed the Mississippi basin for France; sailing back to settle it, La Salle missed the river's mouth, landed in Texas and was killed by one of his own men.
Q 04Napoleon sold Louisiana in 1803 after yellow fever wrecked his army fighting rebels in which present-day country?
Haiti
Haiti was then the French colony of Saint-Domingue; with his army dying there and war with Britain looming, Napoleon offered American envoys all of Louisiana for $15 million.
Q 05Which U.S. president oversaw the Louisiana Purchase?
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson sent his envoys to buy little more than the port of New Orleans, and he believed the Constitution gave him no power to buy territory, yet he took the whole deal without seeking an amendment.
Q 06Which Mardi Gras pastry, iced in purple, green and gold, hides a tiny plastic baby inside?
King cake
King cake comes with a job: whoever finds the baby in their slice is expected to buy the next cake or host the next party, which keeps the cakes coming all Carnival season.
Q 07Which European power governed Louisiana from 1762 until it was secretly handed back to France in 1800?
Spain
Spain left its mark on New Orleans: after great fires in 1788 and 1794 the city was rebuilt in Spanish style, so most of the oldest buildings in the 'French' Quarter are Spanish colonial.
Q 08About 80 percent of New Orleans flooded in 2005 when which structures failed during Hurricane Katrina?
Levees
Levees and floodwalls gave way as the storm surge arrived, and investigators later held the Army Corps of Engineers, which designed and built them, responsible for the breaches.
Q 09Which team did the New Orleans Saints beat in Super Bowl XLIV to win their first championship?
Indianapolis Colts
Indianapolis Colts quarterback Peyton Manning grew up in New Orleans, where his father Archie had starred for the Saints; his late interception, returned 74 yards by Tracy Porter, sealed the 31-17 win.
Q 10Which LSU quarterback won the Heisman Trophy in 2019?
Joe Burrow
Joe Burrow spent two seasons as a backup at Ohio State before transferring to LSU, where he won the Heisman by 1,846 points, beating a record margin O.J. Simpson had held since 1968.
Q 11Which Tennessee Williams play follows Blanche DuBois to her sister's cramped apartment in New Orleans?
A Streetcar Named Desire
A Streetcar Named Desire took its title from a real line that ran through the French Quarter; the Desire streetcars stopped running in 1948, months after the play opened.
Q 12New Orleans' international airport was renamed in 2001 for the centennial of which musician's birth?
Louis Armstrong
Louis Armstrong told the world he was born on July 4, 1900, but a baptismal record points to August 4, 1901, the date the 2001 renaming honored.
Q 13Which stew did Louisiana lawmakers name the official state cuisine in 2004?
gumbo
Q 21Which Louisiana lake is crossed by a 24-mile causeway, Guinness's longest continuous bridge over water?
Lake Pontchartrain
Lake Pontchartrain's causeway held the plain 'longest bridge over water' title until 2011, when a rival bridge opened in China and Guinness split the record into continuous and aggregate categories.
Q 22Unlike the other 49 states, Louisiana's private law is rooted in which legal tradition?
civil law
Civil law came to Louisiana with its colonial rulers and stayed after statehood; despite the popular belief, France's Napoleonic Code itself was never in force there, since it was enacted in 1804, a year after the purchase.
Q 23By what name is the Louisiana State Penitentiary, America's largest maximum-security prison, known?
Gumbo's name most likely comes from a Central African word for okra, the pod that thickens many versions of the stew.
Q 14As of 2018, Louisiana had over 90 percent of America's farms raising which food?
crawfish
Crawfish farming in America is almost all Louisiana's: 449 of the country's 482 crawfish farms were there in 2018, though by then China was raising most of the world's supply.
Q 15Cajuns descend from French colonists the British expelled in the 1750s from which region?
Acadia
Acadia survives in their name: 'Cajun' is a worn-down pronunciation of 'Acadian', carried to Louisiana by exiles who arrived between 1764 and 1788.
Q 16What was populist governor and senator Huey Long's famous nickname?
the Kingfish
The Kingfish won the governorship in 1928 on the slogan 'Every man a king', a promise he later took national with his Share Our Wealth plan to redistribute fortunes.
Q 17Hurricane Katrina peaked as a Category 5 over the Gulf, but at what strength did it make landfall in Louisiana?
Category 3
Category 3 winds of about 125 mph came ashore, down from a 175 mph peak the day before, yet Katrina still became the costliest hurricane the United States had seen up to then.
Q 18Which city, founded in 1714, is the oldest permanent European settlement in Louisiana?
Natchitoches
Natchitoches began as a French trading post four years before New Orleans existed; nearly three centuries later Hollywood arrived to film Steel Magnolias in its streets.
Q 19Only two states have a lower highest point than Louisiana's 535-foot Driskill Mountain: Delaware and which other?
Florida
Florida's Britton Hill reaches just 345 feet, while Kansas, the flat-state guess, climbs past 4,000 feet at Mount Sunflower.
Q 20Onion, bell pepper and which third vegetable make up the 'holy trinity' of Cajun and Creole cooking?
Celery
Celery is in the French mirepoix too; in Louisiana's version of that base, it is the bell pepper that took the carrot's place.
Angola
Angola takes its name from a slave plantation that once stood on the site, and the prison remains a working farm: inmates still tend crops across its 18,000 acres.
Q 24Poverty Point, a UNESCO World Heritage Site in northeastern Louisiana, is what kind of place?
a prehistoric earthwork
A prehistoric earthwork of mounds and curving ridges, Poverty Point was raised more than 3,000 years ago by people who hunted, fished and gathered rather than farmed, yet traded across hundreds of miles.
Q 25Which outlaws were ambushed and killed by a posse on a rural Louisiana road in May 1934?
Bonnie and Clyde
Bonnie and Clyde were tracked to a gang member's family home by retired Texas Ranger Frank Hamer, whose posse hid in roadside bushes before dawn and opened fire when the couple's car appeared.
Q 26Which singer signed a one-year contract with Shreveport's Louisiana Hayride radio show in 1954, at the age of 19?
Elvis Presley
Elvis Presley drew such crowds that after his last Hayride show, in 1956, the announcer had to quiet screaming fans by telling them 'Elvis has left the building', coining the phrase.
Q 27Who was the first woman ever elected governor of Louisiana?
Kathleen Blanco
Kathleen Blanco started out as a high school teacher; she had been governor for less than two years when Hurricane Katrina struck, and she did not run for a second term.
Q 28Whom did Edwin Edwards face in the 1991 runoff remembered for 'Vote for the Crook' stickers?
David Duke
David Duke, a former Klan leader running as a Republican, was denounced as a racist by President George H. W. Bush; Edwards won with 61 percent, then later spent eight years in federal prison for racketeering.
Q 29A 2017 study found coastal Louisiana losing wetlands the size of what every 100 minutes?
Football field
A football field every 100 minutes was the slower, recent pace: when losses were at their worst the coast lost one every 34 minutes, about 2,000 square miles of land in all since 1932.
Q 30The Battle of New Orleans was fought 15 days after which peace treaty ending the War of 1812 was signed?
Treaty of Ghent
The Treaty of Ghent was signed in Belgium on Christmas Eve 1814, but the news was slow to cross the Atlantic; Andrew Jackson's makeshift army, pirates included, then broke the British assault in about half an hour.