Peace Corps Trivia
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57 free Peace Corps trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This Peace Corps trivia quiz covers the American volunteer agency from a late-night campaign promise in 1960 to the worldwide evacuation of 2020. The easy questions are ones anyone with a returned volunteer in the family can attempt: which president created it, who was its first director, how long volunteers serve, where they train and what the famous ask-not line has to do with it. From there it moves into the history: Walter Reuther's proposal, Hubert Humphrey's first bill, the University of Michigan speech, Executive Order 10924, the first countries, the peak year of 1966 and Nixon folding it into ACTION. The harder end is for policy wonks and returned volunteers: the Nigeria postcard incident, the Vietnam-era draft fights, Lillian Carter at 68, the Reagan-era director who brought in Republicans, the Crisis Corps that became Peace Corps Response, the CIA rules, the five-year staff limit, and the surprisingly long list of famous former volunteers from Paul Theroux and Reed Hastings to Chris Dodd, Paul Tsongas and Bob Vila. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries on the Peace Corps, its directors and its notable volunteers before publishing, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. If you enjoy this one, try our John F. Kennedy, US government and 1960s history quizzes next.
30 of 57 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The 1961 Peace Corps Act set the agency the mission of promoting world peace and what else?
Friendship
Friendship. Congress wrote the phrase into the law that made Kennedy's six-month-old agency permanent, and the Peace Corps still describes its purpose as 'world peace and friendship'.
Q 02Who was the Peace Corps' first director?
Sargent Shriver
Sargent Shriver, President Kennedy's brother-in-law, turned a line from a campaign speech into a working agency and had its first volunteers overseas within months.
Q 03How long are Peace Corps volunteers expected to serve in their host country after training?
Two years
Two years, after about three months of training. Students took to the idea at once, and would-be volunteers were writing in as soon as the agency existed.
Q 04Who mostly trains new Peace Corps volunteers today?
Host-country staff
Host-country staff. The first volunteers were prepared on American university campuses, but the agency later moved training to the countries where they would serve, taught mostly by people who live there.
Q 05On the steps of which building did Kennedy first pitch the Peace Corps idea in 1960?
The Michigan Union in Ann Arbor
The Michigan Union in Ann Arbor. Kennedy arrived at 2 a.m. meaning only to sleep, found some 10,000 students waiting up for him, and asked how many would give years of their lives to working abroad.
Q 06Which union leader urged that young Americans be sent abroad with slide rule, textbook and medical kit?
Walter Reuther
Walter Reuther. The auto workers' president argued that the more young people America sent abroad with the tools of peace, the fewer it would need to send with guns.
Q 07Which senator introduced the first bill to create a Peace Corps, to little enthusiasm?
Hubert Humphrey
Hubert Humphrey. He recalled that even liberal senators thought the idea silly and unworkable; once a young president was urging it, he pushed the Peace Corps Act rapidly through the Senate.
Q 08The 'Point Four Youth Corps', a 1950s forerunner of the Peace Corps, took its name from which president's foreign-aid programme?
Harry S. Truman
Harry S. Truman. Sharing American know-how with poorer countries was the fourth foreign-policy aim of his 1949 inaugural address; Wisconsin congressman Henry Reuss proposed sending young volunteers to do it.
Q 09Richard Nixon predicted in 1960 that the Peace Corps would become a haven for whom?
Draft dodgers
Draft dodgers. To head off the charge, service earned young men only a deferment, never an exemption: the draft board could still call them up once they came home.
Q 10The 1961 executive order that created the Peace Corps placed it inside which cabinet department?
The State Department
The State Department. The new agency ran at first on foreign-aid money already voted, and gained permanent standing only when Congress passed the Peace Corps Act that September.
Q 11Which organisation did Kennedy acknowledge in 1962 as the progenitor of the Peace Corps?
Operation Crossroads Africa
Operation Crossroads Africa. Presbyterian minister James H. Robinson founded it in 1958 and sent American students to work alongside young Africans.
Q 12A White House send-off in August 1961 honoured the first Peace Corps volunteers, who were bound for which two countries?
Ghana and Tanganyika
Ghana and Tanganyika, which is now part of Tanzania. Only the Ghana group was at work that month: the Tanganyika volunteers started at the end of September, three weeks after a group sent to Colombia.
Q 13A 1961 postcard from a volunteer describing squalor and primitive living conditions caused a diplomatic row in which country?
Q 21What got volunteer Bruce Murray, a music teacher in Chile, expelled from the Peace Corps in 1967?
Speaking out against the Vietnam War
Speaking out against the Vietnam War. He signed an anti-war petition and wrote to the New York Times; he sued over his expulsion, and in 1969 a federal judge ruled that his free-speech rights had been violated.
Q 22In 1971 President Nixon folded the Peace Corps and domestic volunteer programmes into which new umbrella agency?
ACTION
ACTION. Nixon, a critic of the Peace Corps since his 1960 campaign, merged it with the government's home-front volunteer schemes, and it stayed a subagency there until 1981.
Q 23Which president's mother served as a Peace Corps nurse in India, having applied at 68?
Nigeria
Nigeria. Margery Michelmore's card never left the country: it is said to have been found on the Ibadan campus, copies went round, and angry students demanded that the volunteers be deported.
Q 14The Peace Corps sends volunteers only to countries that have done what?
Invited it in
Invited it in. A host government has to ask for volunteers and say which skills it needs, a rule meant to calm early fears that the agency carried a hidden agenda.
Q 15By 2020, roughly how many Americans had served in the Peace Corps since 1961?
240,000
240,000. The tally climbs slowly because the agency is small: even at its 50th anniversary in 2011 it had only about 8,500 volunteers in the field.
Q 16Kennedy's inaugural address pledged America's 'best efforts' so that people in the world's 'huts and villages' could do what?
Help themselves
Help themselves. He said America would act 'because it is right', not to outdo the communists; the Peace Corps followed six weeks later.
Q 17What did the Peace Corps deliberately avoid to prevent any appearance of favouring the Catholic Church?
Placing volunteers with religious agencies
Placing volunteers with religious agencies. Planners had hoped to subcontract work to church groups, but Catholic bodies were the keenest to take the money, and the White House wanted no church-state row.
Q 18Which future NASA astronaut ran medical care for Peace Corps volunteers in Sierra Leone and Liberia in the 1980s?
Mae Jemison
Mae Jemison. Besides treating volunteers, the young doctor worked with the Centers for Disease Control on vaccine research, and on coming home she applied to NASA.
Q 19Where was the camp at which early Peace Corps trainees finished their preparation after weeks at a US university?
Puerto Rico
Puerto Rico. Instructors borrowed from Britain's Outward Bound schools put recruits through mountain climbing, 'drown-proofing' swimming drills and a four-day survival trek.
Q 20Which 1958 bestseller about blundering American diplomats in Southeast Asia is credited with inspiring the Peace Corps?
The Ugly American
The Ugly American. Its ambassador never leaves his compound or learns the language, while his Soviet rival speaks it fluently; Peace Corps volunteers were sent out to reverse that image.
Jimmy Carter's
Jimmy Carter's. Lillian Carter, a registered nurse from Georgia, served from 1966 to 1968, and since 1986 an award in her name has honoured outstanding volunteers who served at 50 or older.
Q 24Which actor played a debt-ridden Yale graduate who joins the Peace Corps in the 1985 comedy Volunteers?
Tom Hanks
Tom Hanks. His co-star Rita Wilson played an earnest fellow volunteer, and three years later the two were married.
Q 25Which president chose Loret Miller Ruppe to run the Peace Corps as it added business programmes and drew more Republican volunteers?
Ronald Reagan
Ronald Reagan. Ruppe arrived to a budget smaller than the military's marching bands, and recalled him blocking a further cut because the Peace Corps was 'the only thing I got thanked for' at a state dinner.
Q 26The Peace Corps' Crisis Corps grew out of 1990s emergency missions, including aid to refugees from which country's genocide?
Rwanda
Rwanda. In 1994 volunteers moved into a refugee camp to train health workers and show people how to grow their own food, and President Clinton cited that work when he launched the programme in 1996.
Q 27Why did the Peace Corps rename its Crisis Corps 'Peace Corps Response' in 2007?
Its work had spread beyond emergencies
Its work had spread beyond emergencies. Requests kept coming for its short-term specialists outside disaster zones, for HIV education among other things, so the unit took a broader name and kept 'Crisis Corps' for true disasters.
Q 28What did George W. Bush pledge to do with the Peace Corps after 9/11?
Double its size within five years
Double its size within five years. In the same State of the Union speech he asked the agency to join a new push for education and opportunity in the Islamic world.
Q 29What led the Peace Corps to suspend all operations and fly every volunteer home at once?
The COVID-19 pandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic. In March 2020 the agency pulled some 7,300 volunteers out of 61 countries, fearing they would be stranded as international travel shut down.
Q 30Which country's programme, which had sent English teachers since 1993, did the Peace Corps close for good in 2020?
China
China. Volunteers were told the country had outgrown the need, while Senator Rick Scott cheered the exit, saying there was 'no reason we should prop up our adversaries with U.S. tax dollars'.