Q 01/05

Which American pilot vanished over the Pacific in 1937 while attempting to fly around the world?

A) Bessie Coleman

B) Amelia Earhart

C) Jacqueline Cochran

D) Beryl Markham

Answer · why

B) Amelia Earhart

Amelia Earhart had already become the first woman to fly solo nonstop across the Atlantic, in 1932. Neither she nor her navigator Fred Noonan was ever...

Q 02/05

Which Alabama seamstress's 1955 arrest for keeping her bus seat set off the Montgomery bus boycott?

A) Ella Baker

B) Fannie Lou Hamer

C) Daisy Bates

D) Rosa Parks

Answer · why

D) Rosa Parks

Rosa Parks was not the first to refuse: nine months earlier, 15-year-old student Claudette Colvin had been arrested in the same city for doing the sam...

Q 03/05

Which woman escaped slavery and then guided about seventy others to freedom on the Underground Railroad?

A) Harriet Tubman

B) Sojourner Truth

C) Ida B. Wells

D) Phillis Wheatley

Answer · why

A) Harriet Tubman

Harriet Tubman made some 13 secret rescue missions and was nicknamed Moses. She later said she never lost a passenger.

Q 04/05

Florence Nightingale became known as the Lady with the Lamp while nursing soldiers in which war?

A) Boer War

B) Napoleonic Wars

C) Crimean War

D) First World War

Answer · why

C) Crimean War

The Crimean War made Florence Nightingale a national hero after The Times described her night rounds of the wards. She was also a pioneering statistic...

Q 05/05

Which teenage peasant girl inspired the French army that broke the English siege of Orléans in 1429?

A) Charlotte Corday

B) Joan of Arc

C) Madame de Pompadour

D) Catherine de' Medici

Answer · why

B) Joan of Arc

Joan of Arc was burned at the stake two years later, aged about nineteen. The Catholic Church made her a saint in 1920.