History, Can You Eat That?
The starter pack.
Twenty-five quick questions that ease you in. No knowledge assumed. Wrong answers explain themselves. Start here if you came for the stories, not the test.
0 of 20 questions mastered. Current level: 1.
When did the thirteen American colonies formally declare independence from Britain?
The Declaration of Independence, drafted principally by Thomas Jefferson and approved by the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia. The Lexington and Concord engagement (April 1775) had started the shooting war fifteen months earlier but did not formally declare independence. The Treaty of Paris (September 1783) ended the war and confirmed British recognition. The Constitution (1787, ratified 1788) replaced the earlier Articles of Confederation.
Anne Boleyn was Henry VIII's second wife. The marriage produced one daughter (the future Elizabeth I) and ended after three years. How did Anne die?
Anne was tried on substantially fabricated charges of adultery (including incest with her own brother George Boleyn) and beheaded with a French swordsman's sword — imported specially because the standard English execution axe was considered too crude for a queen. She had failed to produce a male heir; Henry wanted to marry Jane Seymour (which he did ten days after Anne's execution). Catherine of Aragon, Henry's first wife, was the one who died of natural causes (probably cancer, 1536). Catherine Howard, Henry's fifth wife, was also beheaded (1542). No English queen was ever burned at the stake.
The Black Death killed somewhere between a third and a half of medieval Europe in four years. It's caused by a single tiny organism, and people argued about which kind for centuries. Bacterial, viral, fungal, or parasitic?
*Yersinia pestis* is a bacterium that lives normally in fleas and rodents. It still exists; people still catch plague every year (about 3,000 cases worldwide), now treatable with antibiotics. The fungal-ergot theory is actually the explanation for the *Dancing Plague* of 1518, not the Black Death — easy to mix up. The 1918 flu was viral. And while plague is spread by flea bites, the killer is the bacterium the flea is carrying, not the flea itself.
Caesar's famous dying words to Brutus — *Et tu, Brute?* — come from?
Shakespeare invented the Latin phrase in 1599. The Roman sources are different. Suetonius reports that Caesar said nothing — or, if anything, the Greek phrase *καὶ σύ, τέκνον* ('you too, my child?') to Brutus before pulling his toga over his head. Plutarch agrees on the toga gesture and says Caesar gave up resistance when he saw Brutus among his attackers. The Latin tag *Et tu, Brute?* is one of the most-quoted lines in English literature and has nothing to do with the historical record.
On Christmas Day in what year did Pope Leo III crown Charlemagne Emperor of the Romans in St Peter's Basilica?
25 December 800. The coronation revived the title of Roman emperor in the West — extinct since the deposition of Romulus Augustulus in 476 — and founded what would later be called the Holy Roman Empire. 962 was Otto I's later coronation that the medieval institutional continuity sometimes starts from. 1066 was the Norman Conquest. 1215 was Magna Carta.
Cleopatra ruled Egypt and is on every Egyptian souvenir from Cairo to Aswan. What was her ethnic background, actually?
The Ptolemaic dynasty was founded in 323 BC by Ptolemy I Soter, one of Alexander the Great's senior Macedonian generals, who took Egypt at Alexander's death. The dynasty ruled Egypt for 275 years and never spoke Egyptian at court — Greek was the language of administration the whole time. Cleopatra VII, the last Ptolemy, was the first to bother learning the Egyptian language. She killed herself in 30 BC after losing the war with Octavian, ending three centuries of Greek rule over Egypt.
Cleopatra VII had two famous Roman political alliances, both producing children. The two Romans were?
Caesar arrived in Alexandria in 48 BC chasing Pompey (who had just been murdered at the Egyptian beach where he landed) and stayed long enough for Cleopatra to bear Caesarion in June 47 BC. Mark Antony arrived in 41 BC and produced twins (Alexander Helios, Cleopatra Selene II) in 40 BC and a younger son (Ptolemy Philadelphus) in 36 BC. Caesarion was executed by Octavian after Cleopatra's suicide. The twins were raised in Rome by Octavian's sister Octavia.
Galileo Galilei was tried by the Roman Inquisition in 1633 for advocating that the Earth orbits the Sun. What was his sentence?
Galileo recanted his Copernican views publicly under threat of torture and was sentenced to house arrest. He spent the last nine years of his life at his villa at Arcetri near Florence, where he continued working on physics and mathematics in private; his *Two New Sciences* (the foundational work of modern mechanics) was written under house arrest and smuggled out for publication in the Dutch Republic in 1638. He went blind in 1638 and died at Arcetri on 8 January 1642. The Inquisition had burned Giordano Bruno in 1600 for related heretical positions; the Catholic Church formally rehabilitated Galileo in 1992.
Genghis Khan built the largest contiguous land empire in history. He died on campaign in August 1227. The cause and burial location were both unusual. What do we actually know?
Genghis died in August 1227 aged about 65 while campaigning against the Tangut Xi Xia state in northwestern China. Ancient sources offer at least four candidate causes: a fall from a horse, an unidentified fever, wounds from an arrow, or complications from a battle injury. The burial was deliberately concealed — by tradition the funeral cortege killed every witness it met en route to the burial site, and a herd of horses was driven over the grave to obliterate it. The location has never been found despite substantial 20th- and 21st-century archaeological efforts.
Ferdinand Magellan led the first expedition to sail around the world. The journey took three years and one ship survived out of five. What part of the round-the-world voyage did Magellan personally complete?
Magellan was killed on the island of Mactan (modern Philippines) on 27 April 1521, in a skirmish with the local chief Lapu-Lapu and his men. The expedition continued under his Basque second-in-command, Juan Sebastián Elcano, who brought the *Victoria* home to Seville on 6 September 1522 with seventeen survivors out of the original 270 crew. Strictly speaking, Elcano was the first person to complete the circumnavigation. Magellan's claim rests on the technicality that he had previously sailed east as far as the Philippines on a Portuguese voyage, so the segment he died on closed the loop.
The Venetian merchant Marco Polo left home in 1271 with his father and uncle on what would become a 24-year journey. Where did they end up, and how long did Marco stay there?
The Polos reached Kublai Khan's court at Shangdu (the *Xanadu* of Coleridge's poem) in 1275 after a 3-year overland journey. Marco served Kublai in administrative and diplomatic roles for about 17 years, returning to Venice via Sumatra and the Persian Gulf in 1295. Constantinople was a way-point, not destination. Saladin had been dead for nearly 80 years by 1271. Genghis Khan had been dead since 1227 — about 44 years before the Polos left Venice. Kublai was Genghis's grandson.
The phrase 'let them eat cake' (*qu'ils mangent de la brioche*) — supposedly Marie Antoinette's reaction on hearing the French peasants had no bread — is one of the most-repeated quotes of the French Revolution era. Did she actually say it?
Rousseau attributes the line to 'a great princess' in Book VI of *Les Confessions*, written between 1765 and 1770. The book was first published in 1782. Marie Antoinette was born in 1755, arrived in France in 1770 as the 14-year-old bride of the future Louis XVI, and could not have said the line that was in print before she was old enough to have said it. The misattribution to her dates from the early 19th century — long after her 1793 execution — and stuck because it suited the political narrative.
The *Mona Lisa* is the most-visited painting in the world. It's also one of the smallest — 77 cm × 53 cm of poplar wood. Who painted it, and when?
Leonardo started the *Mona Lisa* around 1503 in Florence, kept working on it for sixteen years, and was still adding small refinements when he died in France in 1519. The sitter is probably Lisa del Giocondo, the wife of a Florentine silk merchant. Michelangelo's main work of that decade was the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Raphael painted the Vatican Stanze for Pope Julius II. Botticelli had been dead since 1510 and painted in the previous generation.
The Mongol Empire under Kublai Khan reached its greatest extent around 1279, stretching from the Pacific to the Black Sea. By territory, where does it rank in the all-time list of land empires?
The Mongol Empire at its 1279 peak covered about 24 million square kilometres — the largest connected land empire ever. The British Empire was larger in total area (~35 million km²) but it was scattered across oceans, not contiguous. The Russian Empire was the second-largest contiguous land empire (~23 million km² at peak). The Roman Empire at Trajan's peak was about 5 million km², roughly a fifth the size of the Mongol Empire. Genghis Khan started it; his grandsons completed it; it fragmented into four khanates within a few decades.
After Waterloo in 1815 Napoleon was sent into exile for the second and final time. He died there six years later. Where?
Saint Helena, in the middle of the South Atlantic about 2,000 km from the nearest mainland (Angola). The British chose it specifically because the remoteness made escape essentially impossible. Elba was Napoleon's first exile, after his 1814 abdication; he escaped from Elba in March 1815 and reclaimed the throne for the 'Hundred Days' before Waterloo. Corsica was his birthplace (1769). Devil's Island was the French penal colony where [Alfred Dreyfus](/articles/dreyfus-devils-island) was held 80 years later, but Napoleon was never there.
Vesuvius buried Pompeii under a thick layer of pumice and ash in 79 AD. Roughly how deep was the ash deposit on the town when the eruption ended?
Pompeii was buried under roughly 20 feet of pumice and ash by the end of the eruption — enough to bury entire two-story buildings up to their rooftops. Herculaneum, on the western flank of Vesuvius, was buried under much more (about 70 feet of pyroclastic flow material) because the volcano's first major lateral surge went west. The 20-foot depth at Pompeii preserved the town in extraordinary detail and is why the bodies, the wall paintings, and even the loaves of bread in the ovens survived to be excavated.
Who painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel — the 1,100-square-metre fresco that has *The Creation of Adam* in the middle?
Michelangelo did the ceiling on commission from Pope Julius II, mostly working on his back on scaffolding for four years and complaining bitterly the entire time. Leonardo was the same generation but mostly painted small panels and the *Last Supper* (a fresco in Milan, not a Vatican commission). Raphael was painting the Pope's living rooms — the Stanze, right next door to the Sistine — at the same time. Botticelli had actually painted some of the *wall* frescoes in the Sistine 30 years earlier, but not the ceiling.
The 130-ship Spanish Armada sailed to invade Elizabethan England in summer 1588. About 50 of its ships didn't make it home. What killed most of them?
The Channel fights didn't actually sink many ships — the English gunnery was more harassing than lethal. The fireships at Calais broke the Armada's defensive formation but sank only one or two ships directly. What killed most of the lost vessels was the route home: with the English fleet between them and the way they'd come, the Armada had to sail north around Scotland and through the North Atlantic in autumn weather, with damaged ships and bad charts. About 35 ships were wrecked on the Scottish and Irish coasts.
The tomb of the Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamun was one of the few royal tombs to survive ancient looting substantially intact. Who found it, and when?
Carter — financed by his patron Lord Carnarvon — had been excavating in the Valley of the Kings for five years without major success when one of his Egyptian workers found a stone step at the foot of an earlier tomb on 4 November 1922. The tomb was the substantially-intact burial of Tutankhamun (reigned c. 1332–1323 BC), a minor 18th-dynasty pharaoh who had been almost completely forgotten. Schliemann excavated Troy (in modern Turkey, not Egypt). Champollion decoded hieroglyphics. Petrie was an Egyptologist of an earlier generation but did not find Tut.
Queen Victoria married her first cousin Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha in February 1840. They had nine children. He died of typhoid (or possibly cancer) in December 1861. What did she do afterward?
Victoria entered a formalised public mourning that lasted the rest of her life. She wore black on every public occasion; she withdrew from London for most of the 1860s and 1870s; she commissioned an extraordinary number of Albert memorials (the Albert Memorial in Kensington Gardens, the Royal Albert Hall, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and dozens of smaller monuments). She continued the queen's duties from Windsor, Osborne, and Balmoral. Her eldest son Edward eventually succeeded her as Edward VII in 1901 — without an abdication.
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