Getting Up to Speed
The bits everyone forgot.
Charlemagne, Hastings, Magna Carta, Waterloo, the Bastille. The dates and names that schools used to drill, lightly framed for the rest of us.
0 of 22 questions mastered. Current level: 2.
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.
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.
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 decisive battle of the American Revolution trapped a British army under Cornwallis between an American army on land and a French fleet at sea. He surrendered approximately 7,000 troops on 19 October 1781. Where?
Yorktown ended the Revolutionary War militarily; the British government collapsed within months and the peace treaty was signed in Paris in 1783. Saratoga (1777) was earlier and equally important — it persuaded France to formally enter the war on the American side, which was the strategic difference. Bunker Hill (1775) was a tactical British victory at the start of the war. Trenton (Christmas 1776) was Washington's surprise raid across the Delaware. The French fleet at Yorktown was under the Comte de Grasse; the American-French land army was under Washington and Rochambeau.
The United States dropped two atomic bombs on Japanese cities in August 1945. Which two, and what were the dates?
The Hiroshima bomb (*Little Boy*, a uranium-235 gun-type weapon) detonated at 8:15 AM local time on 6 August 1945 and killed roughly 70,000–80,000 people instantly, with the death toll rising to perhaps 140,000 by the end of 1945 from injuries and radiation. The Nagasaki bomb (*Fat Man*, a plutonium implosion weapon) detonated on 9 August at 11:02 AM and killed perhaps 40,000–75,000 by year's end. Tokyo had been firebombed catastrophically in March 1945 (perhaps 100,000 dead) but was not nuclear. Kyoto was on the early atomic target list but was removed by Secretary of War Stimson, who had honeymooned there.
William the Conqueror's Norman army defeated the Anglo-Saxon king Harold at the Battle of Hastings, founding the English political-administrative tradition that the modern British monarchy descends from. What year?
14 October 1066 is the most famous date in English history — a battle that lasted nine hours and ended with King Harold dying with an arrow somewhere in his face (the famous Bayeux Tapestry image). Within twenty years William had replaced approximately 95% of the English landed elite with Normans. The other dates are all real but later: 1100 was Henry I's accession, 1215 was the Magna Carta, 1485 was Bosworth and the Tudor succession.
The Berlin Wall fell on a single night when an East German press spokesman, slightly confused by his own briefing notes, told a journalist that new travel regulations took effect 'immediately.' Crowds gathered at the checkpoints; the border officers opened them on their own initiative. What date?
Günter Schabowski misread his briefing notes at the 9 November 1989 press conference. The officer who actually opened the Bornholmer Straße checkpoint that night was Harald Jäger, a Stasi officer who couldn't reach anyone in authority and made the call himself. The other dates are real but later: 3 October 1990 is German Unity Day (the formal reunification, now Germany's national holiday); the Soviet Union dissolved on 26 December 1991; Reagan's speech at the Brandenburg Gate was two years earlier.
The British Empire was the largest empire in human history. At its 1920s peak, roughly what fraction of the world's land area did it cover?
The British Empire at its post-WWI peak covered roughly 35.5 million km² — about a quarter of the world's land area and a quarter of its population. The Mongol Empire's 1279 peak was about 24 million km² and is still the largest *contiguous* land empire ever, but the British total was larger because it was scattered across the oceans. The Roman Empire at Trajan's peak was about 5 million km² — about a seventh the size of the British peak.
Oliver Cromwell ran England after the execution of Charles I in 1649. What title did he hold from 1653 onward — and did he ever accept the offer to become king?
Cromwell ruled as *Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland, and Ireland* under the Instrument of Government (December 1653) — England's only written constitution to date. In 1657 the Second Protectorate Parliament offered him the crown; he agonised over it for six weeks before declining. The reasons were practical and ideological: too many of his senior army officers were committed republicans who would have rebelled against a Cromwellian monarchy. He died in office on 3 September 1658; his son Richard was a brief and unsuccessful Lord Protector before the monarchy was restored under Charles II in 1660.
The Crystal Palace — the enormous cast-iron and plate-glass building that housed the Great Exhibition — went up in Hyde Park in 1851. Joseph Paxton designed it. How long did construction take from approval of his design to opening day?
Six months. Paxton, the head gardener of Chatsworth House, sketched his design after the official architectural competition's 245 entries had been rejected by the committee. His back-of-an-envelope drawing was approved in two weeks; construction began in autumn 1850; the Exhibition opened on 1 May 1851. The building was 1,851 feet long (deliberately, for the year), used 293,655 panes of glass, and was the largest enclosed space built anywhere in the world up to that point.
Erik the Red was exiled from Iceland in 982 for killing two men. He spent his three-year exile exploring the next island west, then returned and led settlers there. His naming choice for the new territory — *Grœnland*, 'Greenland' — was?
The Icelandic sagas record his explicit reasoning: 'He gave it that name because, he said, men would be more inclined to go there if it had a favourable name.' It is the earliest documented case of deliberate real-estate marketing in European history. The naming worked: approximately 700 Icelanders sailed in 25 ships in 986. Only 14 ships arrived (a storm in the Denmark Strait sank or turned back the rest), but the Eastern Settlement at Brattahlíð that Erik founded became home to a Norse colony that survived for nearly 470 years.
Eugene V. Debs ran for President of the United States as the candidate of the Socialist Party of America. The last campaign was conducted from a federal prison cell. How many times in total did he run?
Five campaigns over twenty years. His peak was 1912, when he polled 901,551 votes (6.0% of the national total) against Wilson, Taft, and Roosevelt. The last campaign was 1920, conducted entirely from his cell at Atlanta Federal Penitentiary, where he was serving ten years for opposing American participation in the First World War. He still got 919,799 votes. President Warren Harding commuted his sentence to time served on Christmas Eve 1921.
The 1883 eruption of Krakatoa produced what is still the loudest sound in recorded human history. The chief of police on Rodrigues Island reported what he thought was distant gunfire. How far away from Krakatoa was he?
Rodrigues Island is east of Madagascar, in the western Indian Ocean — about 4,800 km from the Sunda Strait. The sound reached him four hours after the eruption (sound travels approximately 1,200 km/h). The blast also produced a barometric pressure wave that circled the Earth three and a half times and was detected on weather-station barographs everywhere from London to Boston. Northern Australia, Singapore, and Cape Town all heard reports of the event but at lower volumes or none.
Magna Carta — the foundational charter of English constitutional law and the distant ancestor of most modern bills of rights — was forced on King John by his rebellious barons. Where and when?
Runnymede is a meadow on the Thames between Windsor and Staines. The charter had 63 clauses; most were specific feudal grievances the barons wanted addressed; one — clause 39, on the prohibition of arbitrary imprisonment — is the medieval ancestor of due process. The pope annulled it within ten weeks, John died of dysentery the next year, and the surviving 1225 reissue is what actually entered English law. The other dates are all real but unconnected: Christmas Day 1066 was William the Conqueror's coronation; 6 January 1066 was the coronation of Harold Godwinson; 14 July 1453 was the French capture of Bordeaux, ending the Hundred Years' War.
Napoleon's final defeat at Waterloo on 18 June 1815 ended twenty-three years of more or less continuous European warfare. The two allied commanders who beat him there were?
Wellington held the battlefield with his Anglo-Dutch army through the day; Blücher arrived in the late afternoon with the Prussian reinforcements that finished the French army. Nelson had been dead for ten years by then — killed at Trafalgar in 1805. Marlborough and Eugene won the Battle of Blenheim against Louis XIV in 1704, a century earlier. Kutuzov and Schwarzenberg were both real Napoleonic-era commanders — Kutuzov ran the Russian campaign of 1812, Schwarzenberg led the Allied army at Leipzig in 1813 — but neither was at Waterloo.
The Ottoman Empire — which had ruled portions of southeastern Europe, the Levant, and North Africa since the late 13th century — was formally abolished by the Turkish Grand National Assembly in what year?
The Ottoman sultanate was abolished by the Grand National Assembly on 1 November 1922. The last sultan, Mehmed VI, left Constantinople aboard a British warship two weeks later. The Republic of Turkey was proclaimed almost a year later, on 29 October 1923 — a common but slightly wrong answer to this question. The Mudros armistice (1918) ended Ottoman participation in WWI but did not abolish the sultanate. The Young Turk revolution (1908) restored the suspended 1876 constitution but kept the sultan.
By Roman tradition, the city of Rome was founded by twin brothers raised by a wolf. The traditional date is also unusually specific. What date?
The traditional foundation date is 21 April 753 BC — the day Romulus killed his twin Remus in a dispute about which hill to build the city on. The date was a Roman religious-political calculation, working backward from later dynastic chronologies; modern archaeology suggests continuous settlement on the Palatine hill from approximately the 8th century BC, broadly consistent with the date but with no specific evidence for the twin-wolf-fratricide narrative. 509 BC is the founding of the Roman Republic (the expulsion of the last king Tarquinius Superbus). 600 BC is roughly when the historical urban-Roman state becomes archaeologically visible.
The Soviet Union dissolved on what specific date — the day Mikhail Gorbachev resigned as president and the hammer-and-sickle flag was lowered over the Kremlin for the last time?
Gorbachev resigned on the evening of 25 December 1991 (Christmas Day in the Western calendar; an unremarkable day in the Soviet one). The Soviet flag came down over the Kremlin that evening; the Russian tricolour replaced it. The Supreme Soviet formally voted itself out of existence on 26 December 1991. The Berlin Wall fall (1989) and German reunification (1990) had been earlier substantive steps in the broader Eastern European political reorganisation. The successor states (Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, etc.) had already formed the Commonwealth of Independent States on 8 December 1991.
The Spanish Civil War — fought between the elected Republican government and Franco's Nationalist coalition — ran from?
The Nationalist military rising began on 17–18 July 1936 and the last Republican forces in Madrid surrendered on 1 April 1939. The war killed approximately 500,000 people, brought in foreign military participation on both sides (Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy for the Nationalists; the Soviet Union and the International Brigades for the Republicans), and gave Franco a personal dictatorship that lasted until his death in 1975. 1931–1936 was the Second Spanish Republic before the war.
Charlemagne is on the standard list of European nation-founders. He died in 814. What did he actually rule?
Charlemagne (768–814) was the Frankish king who built a continental empire roughly twice the size of modern France. The pope crowned him Emperor in Rome on Christmas Day 800 — the formal beginning of what would later be called the Holy Roman Empire, although in his lifetime it was just *the Empire*. After his death the empire was divided among his grandsons at the Treaty of Verdun (843), producing the rough geographic templates of modern France, Germany, and Italy. The eastern European territories were ruled by separate non-Frankish dynasties his whole life.
William, Duke of Normandy, defeated the Anglo-Saxon king Harold Godwinson at the Battle of Hastings and was crowned King of England on Christmas Day of the same year. What year?
Battle of Hastings on 14 October 1066; coronation at Westminster Abbey on 25 December 1066. William followed up with twenty years of substantial conquest consolidation — by the time of the Domesday Book (1086) approximately 95% of English landholders had been replaced by Normans and other continental followers of William. Edward the Confessor (reigned 1042–1066) had been the immediately-preceding Anglo-Saxon king whose disputed succession produced the 1066 crisis.
On 28 June 1914 a teenage Bosnian Serb shot the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne and his wife on a Sarajevo street. Five weeks later, most of Europe was at war. Who was the heir he killed?
Franz Ferdinand was Emperor Franz Joseph's nephew and his designated heir after the older man's only son had killed himself at Mayerling in 1889 — that was Crown Prince Rudolf. Karl I was Franz Ferdinand's nephew and became the last Habsburg emperor in 1916. Otto, Karl's son, was born in 1912 and was technically still in the line of succession in 2007, when he renounced it. Franz Ferdinand was the unlucky one.
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