Spanish-American War Trivia
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49 free Spanish-American War trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This Spanish American War trivia quiz covers the 16-week conflict of 1898 that ended Spain's empire in the Americas and made the United States a world power. The easy questions handle the basics: the Maine, McKinley, the Rough Riders, Dewey at Manila Bay and the territories the US took away. From there it moves through the Cuban revolt, Weyler the Butcher, Pulitzer and Hearst, the Teller Amendment, the Guam surrender farce and the battles at Las Guasimas, El Caney and San Juan Hill. The harder half is for history buffs: Redfield Proctor's speech, the Spanish Hornet, Hobson's Merrimac raid, Cervera's doomed sortie, the Puerto Rico landings, Jules Cambon's armistice, the typhoid epidemic in the camps, the four ex-Confederate generals, the Generation of '98 and the Marines who went on to command the Corps. If you have played our American history or Theodore Roosevelt quizzes, this is the deep dive on one war. Every answer was checked against the encyclopaedia entry on the war before publishing.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which 1898 war tax was still collected in 2006?
Phone calls
Phone calls: the one-cent levy fell only on costly long-distance calls, and though repealed and revived several times it outlived the war by more than a century.
Q 02In which harbour did the battleship Maine blow up on the night of 15 February 1898?
Havana
Havana: she had been sent after riots in the city to protect Americans there, and the blast killed most of the men aboard, turning a show of the flag into a cause for war.
Q 03Which territories did Spain cede to the US after the war of 1898?
Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines
Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines: Cuba, the cause of the war, was not annexed, because Congress had ruled that out in advance, and it became independent in 1902 under American supervision.
Q 04Who was US president during the Spanish-American War?
William McKinley
William McKinley: he held out against the war fever for two months after the Maine blew up, won re-election in 1900, and was shot dead by an assassin the following year.
Q 05Spanish general Valeriano Weyler earned which nickname in the American press for herding Cuban civilians into camps?
The Butcher
The Butcher: his camps were meant to cut the rebels off from the countryside, but hunger and disease killed civilians in vast numbers and turned American opinion against Spain.
Q 06Which exiled Cuban poet launched the 1895 uprising against Spanish rule?
José Martí
José Martí: he had organised the revolt from New York, but he was killed in a skirmish within weeks of landing and became the martyr of Cuban independence, honoured as 'the Apostle'.
Q 07What is Cuba's first war of independence, begun in 1868, called?
The Ten Years' War
The Ten Years' War: a sugar planter's call to arms started it, and the peace that ended it left Cuba Spanish, so its veterans took up arms again in 1895.
Q 08What name is given to the stolen 1898 message in which Spain's ambassador called the American president weak?
The de Lôme letter
The de Lôme letter: Cuban rebels got hold of it and a New York paper ran it as 'The Worst Insult to the United States in Its History', forcing the ambassador out days before the Maine blew up.
Q 09Which two New York publishers' sensational coverage of Cuba became known as yellow journalism?
Pulitzer and Hearst
Pulitzer and Hearst: the name came from the Yellow Kid, a comic-strip character the two papers fought over in their circulation war, and it stuck to their lurid Cuba headlines.
Q 10Where does the mainmast of the battleship Maine now stand as a memorial?
Arlington Cemetery
Arlington Cemetery: Army engineers raised the wreck from the harbour floor in 1910–12, and her mast now rises over the graves of about 230 of her crew, set on a base shaped like a gun turret.
Q 11What did the US Navy's 1898 inquiry blame for the explosion that sank the Maine?
A mine under the hull
A mine under the hull: the court named no culprit, but many Americans blamed Spain; later studies, including one for Admiral Rickover in 1974, pointed instead to a coal fire inside the ship.
Q 12How did the popular American slogan that began 'Remember the Maine' end?
To Hell with Spain!
To Hell with Spain! The rhyme became the war party's rallying cry, though the Navy's inquiry never said who had destroyed the ship.
Q 13What name, taken from a British music-hall song, was given to Americans clamouring for war with Spain in 1898?
Jingoes
Q 21US troops stormed the Philippine capital on 13 August 1898, unaware of what news from Washington?
A ceasefire had been signed
A ceasefire had been signed: the peace protocol was agreed the day before, but the news had not crossed the Pacific, and shutting the Filipino army out of the captured city sowed the seeds of the next war.
Q 22Which rifle gave Spanish troops in Cuba an edge over the Americans in 1898?
Mauser
Mauser: it fired smokeless powder, so Spanish riflemen gave off no telltale puff of smoke and were almost impossible to spot.
Q 23Where did a battalion of US Marines land in Cuba in June 1898?
Guantánamo Bay
Jingoes: the word came from an 1878 London song vowing to fight Russia 'by jingo', and twenty years later even Spain's ambassador was sneering at the jingoes in Washington.
Q 14Which measure in the 1898 war resolution renounced any American claim to Cuba?
Teller Amendment
The Teller Amendment: named for Colorado senator Henry Teller, it promised to leave the island to its people once Spain was gone, which is why Cuba never became an American possession like the war's other prizes.
Q 15From which Florida port did the US Army's invasion force sail for Cuba in June 1898?
Tampa
Tampa: tens of thousands of soldiers crowded into the small town, and when the transports finally sailed there was room aboard for only part of the army.
Q 16Which assistant secretary of the navy ordered Dewey's squadron to Hong Kong ahead of the war?
Theodore Roosevelt
Theodore Roosevelt: he liked to make policy whenever the Navy Secretary stepped out, and one such afternoon he cabled the Asiatic Squadron to fill its coal bunkers and be ready to strike.
Q 17Commodore George Dewey destroyed a Spanish squadron on 1 May 1898 in the harbour of which city?
Manila
His flagship was USS Olympia and he lost no men, with only nine wounded.
Q 18Which European power sent a squadron to shadow Dewey's fleet in the Philippines, raising fears it wanted the islands?
Germany
Germany: Admiral von Diederichs arrived six weeks after the battle, and the fear that Berlin or another power would seize the islands became a leading argument for the United States keeping them.
Q 19Which Filipino leader did Dewey bring back from exile in Hong Kong to rally rebels against Spain?
Emilio Aguinaldo
Emilio Aguinaldo: he declared independence within weeks of landing, but when the Americans kept the islands he turned his army against them and fought on until his capture in 1901.
Q 20Which Pacific island group did the United States annex in July 1898, in the middle of its war with Spain?
Hawaii
Hawaii: annexation had stalled for years, but once ships and troops were crossing the Pacific to fight, Congress pushed it through by joint resolution as a stepping stone to Asia.
Guantánamo Bay: the Marines seized it as a sheltered coaling station for the blockading fleet, and the United States has kept a naval base there under a lease dating from 1903.
Q 24Joseph Wheeler led US cavalry in Cuba in 1898, three decades after commanding cavalry in which army?
Confederate army
Confederate army: he was a Southern major general at 26, spent years in Congress working to heal the breach between North and South, then volunteered at 61 for the war in Cuba.
Q 25Which American novelist came under fire with US Marines in Cuba as a newspaper correspondent in 1898?
Stephen Crane
Stephen Crane: he had written The Red Badge of Courage, his Civil War classic, without ever seeing a battle, and Cuba showed him the real thing two years before tuberculosis killed him.
Q 26The 1st US Volunteer Cavalry of 1898 was popularly known as what?
The Rough Riders
The Rough Riders: the regiment mixed frontiersmen with Ivy League athletes, and although it was raised as cavalry its troopers made their famous charge in Cuba on foot.
Q 27The cavalry charge of 1 July 1898 remembered as San Juan Hill was actually made up which smaller rise beside it?
Kettle Hill
Kettle Hill: the dismounted troopers, Black regulars among them, took it first, while the infantry stormed the larger ridge beside it that gave the battle its name.
Q 28What weapon's supporting fire was described as critical to the success of the assault on San Juan Hill?
Gatling guns
Gatling guns: when the drumming began, men on the slope feared Spanish machine guns, until an officer leapt up shouting 'It's the Gatlings, men, our Gatlings!' as Lieutenant Parker pushed his guns forward.
Q 29Which future general fought at San Juan Hill as a lieutenant in the 10th Cavalry?
John J. Pershing
John J. Pershing: his nickname 'Black Jack' is usually traced to his service with this Black regiment, and it followed him all the way to command of the American army in France in 1917.
Q 30Lieutenant Richmond Hobson became a hero in 1898 by deliberately sinking his own ship to do what?
Bottle up the Spanish fleet
Bottle up the Spanish fleet: gunfire wrecked the old collier's steering and she sank where she blocked nothing, yet Hobson came home from a Spanish prison an overnight celebrity.