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History is exciting, analytical, sad, and enlightening. Learning history will help us understand past events. Also, it can help us utilize lessons from past experiences to prevent future problems.
History is also a great source of exciting quiz questions. If you’re bored of science and technology, you can always play around with past events to refresh your memory.
However, you shouldn’t expect kids to have vivid memories of the causes of the first world war or the Hiroshima bombing. They’re not old enough for such complicated questions.
If you’re unsure of what questions to ask in a history quiz, we’ve come up with the most comprehensive list of exciting history trivia questions on the internet.
The questions get more difficult on the way down, so feel free to test yourself with some more difficult ones. Even the easy-looking ones may not be as easy as you think!
History trivia questions for kids
1- Who was the first man on the moon?
Answer: Neil Armstrong was the first man to step on the moon. He traveled with Buzz Aldrin, and they toured the surface of the moon for three hours.
2- When did the United States gain its independence?
Answer: The United States of America gained its independence on July 4, 1776, from Great Britain.
3- Who invented the lightbulb?
Answer: Thomas Edison.
4- When did Washington DC become the Capital of the United States?
Answer: 1790. The state was established by the constitution to serve as the capital of the United States.
5- What’s the official currency used in Japan?
Answer: The Japanese Yen. Japan adopted the Yen on May 10, 1871, to replace the previous overly complex monetary system.
6- Who invented the car?
Answer: Carl Friedrich Benz. While many opine that Henry Ford invented the automobile, he only paved the way for large-scale production.
7- Who invented the sport of basketball?
Answer: James Naismith invented basketball in Massachusetts on December 21, 1891. He created the game as a sport that could be played indoors during the winter with lesser risks of injury than soccer and baseball.
8- What’s the oldest University in the United States?
Answer: Harvard University.
9- When was the inaugural Tour de France bike race?
Answer: 1903. L’Auto sponsored the race as a publicity stunt to boost the circulation of the plummeting newspaper.
10- Who invented the World Wide Web?
Answer: The World Wide Web was invented by Tim Berners-Lee.
11- When did Alexander the Great conquer Egypt?
Answer: Alexander conquered Egypt in 332 BC.
12- What ancient humans were the first writers?
Answer: The Sumerians. They started writing around 3000 to 3500 BCE.
13- Who discovered America?
Answer: Did you say Christopher Columbus? Well, you would be wrong; it’s Leif Eriksson. Christopher Columbus didn’t even set foot in South America on any of his four trips.
Fun fact: He also didn’t prove that the Earth was round.
14- What country has the most pyramids?
Answer: Again, Egypt isn’t the country with the most pyramids. Sudan has more pyramids than Egypt. Egypt has 118 officially identified pyramid tombs, while Sudan has around 200 to 255.
15- What country pioneered paper money?
Answer: China. The Chinese started using paper notes from 600 to 900 AD.
16- Who was the first elected president of the United States?
Answer: George Washington was the first elected American president. He became president on April 30, 1789, in New York, the then capital of the United States.
17- What was the title of the first YouTube video?
Answer: ‘Me at the zoo.’ Jawed Karim posted the video on the video-sharing site on April 23, 2005.
18- What are the participating countries in the Hundred Years War?
Answer: England and France. The war lasted for 116 years, hence the name. The war started in 1337 and was brought to an end in 1453.
19- Who led Germany to the second World War?
Answer: Adolf Hitler.
20- What was the first capital of the United States?
Answer: New York. It remained the capital city until 1790 when it officially became the largest city in the United States.
21- How many stripes are on the flag of the United States of America?
Answer: Thirteen stripes. The stripes represent the 13 colonies that declared independence from the Kingdom of Great Britain.
22- How many stars are on the United States flag?
Answer: The flag of the United States of America contains 50 stars, each representing each of the fifty states in the country.
23- What is the tallest building in the world?
Answer: The Burj Khalifa in the United Arab Emirates is the tallest building in the world. From ground level, the Burj Khalifa is 830m high at the tip.
24- How many pyramids can be found in Egypt?
Answer: There are 118 identified pyramid tombs in Egypt.
25- When was the oldest university in the United States Established?
Answer: Harvard, the oldest university in the United States, was established in 1636.
26- What domestic animal do ancient Egyptians worship?
Answer: Cats. In ancient Egypt, members of a household will shave off their eyebrows if their housecat died.
27- How many people have stepped foot on the moon?
Answer: Including Neil Armstrong in 1969, only 12 people have set foot on the lunar surface.
28- What’s Leonardo da Vinci’s most famous painting?
Answer: Mona Lisa. He made the painting in the 1500s, and it recently sold for $475 million.
29- What ancient people used urine for mouthwash?
Answer: The Romans. That’s really gross, and gives the phrase “Potty Mouth” a whole new meaning!
30- How many presidents of the United States have won Nobel Peace Prizes?
Answer: Four. Theodore Roosevelt, Jimmy Carter, Barrack Obama, and Woodrow Wilson all have a Nobel Peace Prize.
31- How much did the United States pay for Florida?
Answer: The United States paid $5,000,000 for Florida in 1819. The city belonged to Spain originally.
32- When was the National Basketball Association (NBA) founded?
Answer: The NBA was founded in 1946 by a merger between the Basketball Association of America and the National Basketball League.
33- What do the five rings on the Olympics logo represent?
Answer: They represent the union of the five continents participating in the Games. South America and North America are merged into one continent, and Antarctica doesn’t participate.
34- Who has won the most FIFA world cups in history?
Answer: Brazil. They’ve won the competition five times.
35- What does FIFA stand for?
Answer: Federation Internationale de Football Association. It’s in French, and it translates literally as the International Federation of Association Football.
36- When was FIFA established?
Answer: FIFA was established on May 21, 1904, in Paris. Little wonder the abbreviation is in French.
37- What is the hottest planet in our solar system?
Answer: Did you say, Mercury? You’d be wrong; it’s Venus.
38- What’s the extreme fear of spiders?
Answer: Arachnophobia (from arachnids, obviously).
39- Who was the first person(s) to climb Mount Everest?
Answer: Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay in 1953.
40- What ancient country mummifies their important people when they die?
Answer: Egypt. They also build tombs to enclose these mummies.
41- Who is a pharaoh?
Answer: Pharaohs refer to any of the ancient kings of Egypt before the annexation of Egypt by the Roman Empire.
42- What is the name of the official plane of the president of the United States?
Answer: Air Force One.
43- Who is considered to be the father of history?
Answer: Herodotus. He is popularly known for writing an objective account of the Greco-Persian Wars. He named the book ‘The Histories.’ He was born in the 5th century BC.
44- Who was the first Emperor of the Roman Empire?
Answer: Augustus Caesar. One of the few Caesars to achieve fame without having Julius in his name.
45- What’s the longest river in Africa?
Answer: The Nile. It flows from Northern African into the Mediterranean Sea. The total length of the river is 6,650km or 4,100 miles.
46- When did the second world war end?
Answer: World War II ended on September 2, 1945, after Japan surrendered to the US forces.
47- Who was the first African-American president of the United States?
Answer: Barrack Obama. He got elected as president in 2009 and got reelected in 2013. He went on to win the Nobel Peace Prize, making him one of the only four US presidents to achieve this feat.
48- What triggered World War 1?
Answer: The first world war was caused by the murder of Franz Ferdinand in Austria. The conflict, also known as The Great War, led to the death of over 16 million people.
49- What did Gutenberg invent?
Answer: Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press.
50- What is Gutenberg’s full name?
Answer: His full name is (drumrolls) Johannes Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenberg. For someone who made one of the world’s most famous inventions, the name isn’t surprising.
51- There were two neutral countries during the second world war; what were they?
Answer: Spain and Switzerland. While most countries sided with either the Axis or the Allies, Spain, and Switzerland maintained neutrality throughout the war.
52- When did the Hiroshima bombings happen?
Answer: The United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima in Japan, killing approximately 80,000 people instantly.
53- How many oceans are there?
Answer: Five. It was previously four, namely the Pacific, Atlantic, Indian, and Arctic oceans, but biologists have recently agreed on the existence of the Southern Ocean.
54- What’s the coldest planet in the solar system?
Answer: With an average temperature of about minus 200 degrees centigrade, Neptune is the coldest planet in the solar system. However, Uranus holds the record for the lowest temperatures ever recorded.
55- What city was the capital of the United States for 24 hours?
Answer: Pennsylvania. The government withdrew the capital from Philadelphia for one day to avoid the oncoming British troops in 1777.
56- When did the American civil war end?
Answer: The American Civil War ended on May 9, 1865, after Joseph Johnston surrendered his army. It took one month for the then president to declare victory, officially ending the war on May 9.
57- Who invented baseball?
Answer: Nobody is sure about who invented the sport, but it’s not Abner Doubleday. All credible evidence points to Alexander Cartwright, and he’s most probably the inventor of the sport.
58- Who was the first president of the United States?
Answer: No, I didn’t duplicate this question, and no, the answer isn’t George Washington. George Washington was only the first elected president and was not the first president of the United States.
The first president of the United States is Peyton Randolph. He also happened to be the third president too.
59- Who gifted the Statue of Liberty to the United States?
Answer: New York funded the granite base of the Statue of Liberty. However, the statue itself was a gift by France to the United States.
60- Who was the first president to live in the White House?
Answer: While George Washington oversaw the construction of the building, he never lived in the White House. John Adams was the first American president to live in the White House, moving in with his wife in 1800.
Conclusion
And that concludes our list of 60 exciting history trivia questions for kids. Were you amazed to learn that George Washington wasn’t the first president of the United States?
That’s just the tip of the iceberg, compared to the scores of questions that this list contains.
These questions can help you plan out and organize quizzes for both younger and older kids. You can slip some of the seemingly simple questions into advanced trivia to surprise participants!
And hey, we included the answers too. This way, you don’t have to keep Googling for answers to every single question up there!
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