Modern History Trivia
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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
Kitty Hawk in North Carolina: the Wrights flew from the dunes at Kill Devil Hills, four miles south of the town, on 17 December 1903; the first hop lasted 12 seconds.
Q 02The Titanic sank in April 1912 on a voyage from Southampton to where?
New York City
New York City was the destination; Titanic struck an iceberg late on 14 April 1912 and sank early on 15 April, with about 1,500 of the roughly 2,200 aboard lost.
Q 03Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in June 1914 in which city?
Sarajevo
In Sarajevo on 28 June 1914 the Bosnian Serb student Gavrilo Princip shot the Archduke and his wife Sophie at close range, lighting 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
57,470 British casualties, including 19,240 killed, made 1 July 1916 the bloodiest single 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
Arthur Balfour addressed the 2 November 1917 letter to Lord Rothschild, a leader of Britain's Jewish community, pledging support for a 'national home for the Jewish people' in Palestine.
Q 06Who led the Bolsheviks in the October Revolution of 1917?
Vladimir Lenin
Vladimir Lenin led the Bolshevik seizure of power in Petrograd on 7 November 1917 (25 October in the old Russian calendar), toppling Kerensky's Provisional Government.
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 British salt monopoly was the target; the 24-day walk to Dandi ran from 12 March to 6 April 1930 as a campaign of tax resistance.
Q 10The Wall Street crash that began the Great Depression happened in which month and year?
October 1929
October 1929: Black Thursday (24 October) and Black Tuesday (29 October) saw the Dow collapse, opening the Depression generally dated 1929 to 1939.
Q 11Which president introduced the phrase 'New Deal' when accepting his party's nomination in 1932?
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Franklin D. Roosevelt told the 1932 Democratic convention 'I pledge myself to a new deal for the American people'; 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
The Nationalists under Franco, backed by Germany and Italy, defeated the Soviet-backed Republic in a war that ran from July 1936 to April 1939.
Q 21How many leading Nazis were tried by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg in 1945-46?
22
22 defendants were tried (Martin Bormann in absentia); 24 had been indicted but Robert Ley killed himself and Gustav Krupp was ruled unfit. Twelve were sentenced to death.
Q 22India and Pakistan legally came into existence at midnight on which date in 1947?
14-15 August
At midnight on 14-15 August 1947 Nehru made his 'tryst with destiny' speech; Mountbatten had brought the date forward from June 1948, and partition displaced 12 to 20 million people.
Q 23How much did the United States transfer to Western Europe under the Marshall Plan?
$13.3 billion
Q 14Kristallnacht, the Nazi pogrom against Jews, took place on which nights?
9-10 November 1938
On 9-10 November 1938 the SA and SS led attacks that smashed Jewish shops and burned hundreds of synagogues while police looked on; some 30,000 Jewish men were sent to camps.
Q 15Which August 1939 pact secretly carved up Eastern Europe between Germany and the USSR?
The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact
The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 23 August 1939 carried a secret protocol dividing Poland, the Baltic states and Bessarabia between Germany and the USSR; Germany invaded Poland on 1 September.
Q 16How many Americans were killed in the attack on Pearl Harbor?
2,403
2,403 Americans died, including 1,177 aboard USS Arizona; Roosevelt called 7 December 1941 'a date which will live in infamy'.
Q 17Which World War II battle, fought from July 1942 to February 1943, is considered the largest and deadliest urban battle in history?
Stalingrad
Stalingrad ended on 2 February 1943 with the surrender of Paulus's Sixth Army; roughly two million soldiers and civilians were killed, wounded or captured in the city's ruins.
Q 18Which of the five D-Day beaches saw the highest casualties?
Omaha
Omaha Beach cost the Americans about 2,400 casualties on 6 June 1944, the worst of the five beaches, as bluffs and intact German defences covered the shore.
Q 19The atomic bombs used in 1945 were designed at which laboratory?
Los Alamos
Los Alamos, directed by Robert Oppenheimer, produced both designs: 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
6 and 9 August 1945: Little Boy hit Hiroshima and Fat Man hit Nagasaki, killing an estimated 150,000 to 246,000 people by the end of 1945.
$13.3 billion flowed through the European Recovery Program between April 1948 and 1951; Britain received the largest share, followed by France.
Q 24The Berlin Blockade of 1948-49 saw the Soviets cut off which access routes to West Berlin?
Railway, road and canal
Railway, road and canal links were cut from 24 June 1948; the Allies flew in supplies by air until the Soviets lifted the blockade on 12 May 1949.
Q 25The People's Republic of China was proclaimed on which date?
1 October 1949
On 1 October 1949 Mao Zedong proclaimed the People's Republic from Tiananmen Gate in Beijing; Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists withdrew to Taiwan that December.
Q 26Along which line was Korea divided into occupation zones after 1945?
The 38th parallel
The 38th parallel split the Soviet and US zones in 1945; North Korea invaded across it on 25 June 1950, and the 1953 armistice line runs close to it.
Q 27Who nationalised the Suez Canal in 1956, prompting invasion by Britain, France and Israel?
Gamal Abdel Nasser
Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalised the canal on 26 July 1956; pressure from both the US and USSR forced Britain, France and Israel to withdraw, a humiliation that ended Britain's great-power pretensions.
Q 28The Treaty of Rome, signed in 1957, created what?
The European Economic Community
The European Economic Community was created by the six signatories (Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and West Germany) and came into being on 1 January 1958 alongside Euratom.
Q 29Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite, was launched on which date?
4 October 1957
4 October 1957: Sputnik 1 went up from Baikonur; 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
Vostok 1 carried Gagarin once around Earth in 108 minutes on 12 April 1961; it was his only spaceflight, and he died in a 1968 jet crash.