Q 01/05

Stanford was founded in memory of Leland Jr., who died of what disease at the age of 15?

A) Scarlet fever

B) Typhoid fever

C) Tuberculosis

D) Diphtheria

Answer · why

B) Typhoid fever

Typhoid fever: he fell ill after a snowbound visit to Athens, where the keen young collector had met Heinrich Schliemann, the excavator of Troy, and d...

Q 02/05

Besides running a railroad and serving as a state governor, Leland Stanford held which national office?

A) US Senator

B) Secretary of the Treasury

C) Ambassador to Britain

D) Postmaster General

Answer · why

A) US Senator

US Senator from 1885 until his death in 1893. Sixteen years earlier he had driven the golden spike that completed the transcontinental railroad; it is...

Q 03/05

After their son's death, the Stanfords resolved that whose children 'shall be our children'?

A) California's

B) America's

C) The railroad workers'

D) The world's

Answer · why

A) California's

California's, in the Stanfords' famous phrase: having lost their only child, they signed the founding grant in November 1885 and deeded the new univer...

Q 04/05

Stanford's campus is nicknamed 'the Farm' because it was built on what?

A) The Stanfords' horse-breeding estate

B) A former dairy cooperative

C) The state agricultural college

D) A Spanish mission's wheat fields

Answer · why

A) The Stanfords' horse-breeding estate

The Stanfords' horse-breeding estate, the Palo Alto Stock Farm, raised trotters; there in 1878 Eadweard Muybridge photographed a galloping horse for L...

Q 05/05

Stanford's cornerstone was laid on 14 May 1887, a date chosen because it was what?

A) Leland Jr.'s birthday

B) The Stanfords' wedding anniversary

C) California's admission day

D) Jane Stanford's birthday

Answer · why

A) Leland Jr.'s birthday

Leland Jr.'s birthday: he would have turned 19 that day. The boy had been an avid collector, and his parents also founded a campus museum in his memor...