100 free Modern History trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
58 free Modern history trivia questions with answers. Modern history starts with two bicycle mechanics on a North Carolina beach and runs to a pandemic that shut down the planet. This modern history trivia quiz stays firmly after 1900: Sarajevo and the Somme, Lenin's Bolsheviks, the 1918 flu, Versailles, the Wall Street crash and the New Deal, Weimar and Kristallnacht, Pearl Harbor, Stalingrad, D-Day and Los Alamos. The post-war half covers Nuremberg and partition, the Marshall Plan and the Berlin airlift, Mao's proclamation, Korea and Suez, Sputnik and Gagarin, the Wall going up and coming down, the Cuban missiles, Dallas, Montgomery, Vietnam, the Six-Day War, Prague, Apollo 11, Watergate, Iran, Solidarity, Chernobyl, Tiananmen, the end of the USSR, Mandela, Maastricht, Rwanda, 9/11, the Arab Spring, Brexit and COVID. The questions run from easy to expert, so it works for a classroom, a pub round or a solo check of how much of the last century actually stuck. Every answer is checked against a cited source shown under the question.
30 of 100 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The Wright brothers made the first controlled, powered flight in December 1903 near which town?
Kitty Hawk in North Carolina
Their patent, filed months earlier, claimed not a flying machine but a system for controlling one.
Q 02The Titanic sank in April 1912 on a voyage from Southampton to where?
New York City
About 1,500 of the 2,208 aboard died on her maiden voyage.
Q 03Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in June 1914 in which city?
Sarajevo
The Bosnian Serb student Gavrilo Princip shot him and his wife Sophie at close range; the assassination lit the fuse of the First World War.
Q 04How many casualties did the British Army suffer on the first day of the Somme, 1 July 1916?
57,470
Including 19,240 killed, the worst day in the British Army's history.
Q 05The Balfour Declaration of November 1917 was a letter from the British foreign secretary to whom?
Lord Rothschild
It pledged support for a 'national home for the Jewish people' in Palestine, then an Ottoman region with an Arab majority.
Q 06Who led the Bolsheviks in the October Revolution of 1917?
Vladimir Lenin
It was one stage of a wider Russian Revolution that ran on to 1923.
Q 07The 1918-1920 influenza pandemic is estimated to have killed at least how many people?
17 million
Estimates run from 17 to 50 million and possibly 100 million; the earliest probable cases were in Kansas, not Spain.
Q 08On what date was the Treaty of Versailles signed?
28 June 1919
Exactly five years to the day after Franz Ferdinand's assassination.
Q 09Gandhi's 1930 march to Dandi was a protest against what?
The British salt monopoly
The 24-day walk to Dandi ran from 12 March to 6 April 1930.
Q 10The Wall Street crash that began the Great Depression happened in which month and year?
October 1929
The Depression is generally dated 1929 to 1939.
Q 11Which president introduced the phrase 'New Deal' when accepting his party's nomination in 1932?
Franklin D. Roosevelt
The reforms ran from 1933 to 1938 after his landslide over Hoover.
Q 12The Weimar Republic ended in what year?
1933
Germany's first constitutional republic ran from November 1918 to March 1933; Hitler had joined the tiny DAP in September 1919.
Q 13The Spanish Civil War was fought between the Republicans and which rebel side?
The Nationalists
It ran from 1936 to 1939; the Soviet Union backed the Republic, Germany and Italy backed Franco.
Q 21How many leading Nazis were tried by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg in 1945-46?
22
Six German organisations were tried alongside them; the four powers were France, the USSR, the UK and the US.
Q 22India and Pakistan legally came into existence at midnight on which date in 1947?
14-15 August
The partition displaced 12 to 20 million people; viceroy Mountbatten had brought the date forward.
Q 23How much did the United States transfer to Western Europe under the Marshall Plan?
$13.3 billion
Seventeen countries shared the European Recovery Program money from 1948.
Q 14Kristallnacht, the Nazi pogrom against Jews, took place on which nights?
9-10 November 1938
The SA and SS led it while the authorities looked on.
Q 15Which agreement, signed a week before Germany invaded Poland, carved up Eastern Europe with the USSR?
The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact
The invasion began on 1 September 1939.
Q 16How many Americans were killed in the attack on Pearl Harbor?
2,403
Roosevelt called December 7, 1941 'a date which will live in infamy'.
Q 17Which World War II battle is considered the largest and deadliest urban battle in history?
Stalingrad
It ran from July 1942 to February 1943 and ended with the Axis expelled from the Caucasus.
Q 18Which of the five D-Day beaches saw the highest casualties?
Omaha
Its high cliffs did the damage; the seaborne assault was codenamed Operation Neptune.
Q 19The atomic bombs used in 1945 were designed at which laboratory?
Los Alamos
Robert Oppenheimer directed it; Little Boy was a uranium gun-type bomb, Fat Man a plutonium implosion device.
Q 20On which two dates were atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
6 and 9 August 1945
They killed 150,000 to 246,000 people and remain the only nuclear weapons used in war.
Q 24The Berlin Blockade of 1948-49 saw the Soviets cut off which access routes to West Berlin?
Railway, road and canal
The Western Allies answered with an airlift that lasted until May 1949.
Q 25The People's Republic of China was proclaimed on which date?
1 October 1949
It capped a revolution begun in 1927; Mao had risen to undisputed leadership during the Long March.
Q 26Along which line was Korea divided into occupation zones after 1945?
The 38th parallel
North Korea invaded across it on 25 June 1950; UN forces later pushed back to roughly the same line.
Q 27Who nationalised the Suez Canal in 1956, prompting invasion by Britain, France and Israel?
Gamal Abdel Nasser
Pressure from both the US and USSR forced the invaders out, and historians date the end of Britain's superpower status to the fiasco.
Q 28The Treaty of Rome, signed in 1957, created what?
The European Economic Community
Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and West Germany signed it; it took effect on 1 January 1958.
Q 29Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite, was launched on which date?
4 October 1957
Its beeps set off the Space Race and, in the U.S., a scramble to fund science education.
Q 30Aboard which spacecraft did Yuri Gagarin become the first person in space on 12 April 1961?
Vostok 1
He completed one orbit; it was his only spaceflight.