Thanksgiving Trivia — 39 Questions & Answers

Ten questions, and a useful place to calibrate the room. Read all ten before giving any answers: it keeps the pace up and stops one confident uncle turning each question into a lecture. The difficulty labels come from the open database the questions were drawn from and do not always match a real table — the first man in space is marked hard and is usually the fastest answer of the night.

The opening question about the most successful tank commander of the Second World War is the hardest thing on the page, and the confirmed totals claimed for tank aces are argued over by historians. If the room is warming up slowly, start at question three and come back to it.

The second ten runs wider — a sacred text, a wartime prime minister, a neutral power often mistaken for a belligerent, and an Australian head of government who vanished while swimming in December 1967 and was never found. It reads easier than round one, so lead with it if half the table is under sixteen.

Two of these start an argument rather than settle one. Canada's first capital is Kingston only if the question means the Province of Canada from 1841; anyone thinking of the country created in 1867 will say Ottawa, and will not be being stupid. And the share of the world's population lost to Tamerlane's conquests rests on estimates historians treat with real caution: accept the answer, but say out loud that the figure is a modern reconstruction rather than a count.

This is the dates round, and it travels best of the four: the collapse of the Soviet Union, Napoleon's coronation on 2 December 1804, the marriage that joined Castile and Aragon, the bakery on Pudding Lane where the Great Fire began in the small hours of 2 September 1666. Numbers give a table something to bid against, which suits the closest-guess scoring described further down.

Two footnotes for whoever is reading. The flying shuttle question dates John Kay's invention to 1738; his patent is dated 26 May 1733, so a player who says 1733 has the better date. And the phrasing about Canada leaving a confederation is upside down — 1 July 1867 is the date Confederation created the Dominion, still under the British Crown, with the Statute of Westminster in 1931 and patriation in 1982 doing the rest of the work.

Nine questions to finish, opening with the best myth on the page. Marie Antoinette almost certainly never said "let them eat cake". The line appears in Rousseau's Confessions, written around 1765 and attributed only to "a great princess", when the future queen was nine years old and living in Austria; it was not fixed to her in print until roughly fifty years after her death.

Ethiopia is the answer the colonisation question wants, and the defeat of an Italian army at Adwa in 1896 is why — though expect somebody to raise the Italian occupation of 1936 to 1941, and let them. The Titanic question deserves latitude too: Royal Mail Ship is the expected answer, and Royal Mail Steamer was also in use at the time.

The quiz works from about four players up to twenty. Above eight, stop playing as individuals and split into teams of three or four: it hides the gaps in anybody's knowledge, halves the marking, and stops the quiet people staying quiet for an hour. Mixed teams beat generational teams every time. Teenagers against grandparents produces one landslide and one sulk.

All 39 questions, read aloud with the arguing left in, takes roughly fifty minutes; a round of ten takes ten to twelve including marking. The slot that works is after the plates are cleared and before dessert. Score it as dully as possible — one point per answer, no half points unless the table agrees. Have one person mark who is not playing, or swap papers between teams. Phones face down in the middle: the game ends the moment one person starts checking.

For mixed ages, give the youngest team first refusal on any question they call, and allow every team one pass. When time runs short, cut to two rounds — three and four travel furthest — and hold three questions back rather than rushing the last ten. Ending early with people wanting more beats running into the washing-up.

There are two kinds of hard question and only one is any fun. The good kind gives a table a foothold: a date to bracket, a name half remembered, a process of elimination. The bad kind offers nothing, and the room goes flat. Here the footholdless ones are the tank commander in round one, the year of the Marian reforms, the odd name out among the Seven Warring States, the kingdom once called Lan Xang, and the year a smokeless tobacco brand launched a particular product. Either drop them or use them deliberately, as below.

The opposite problem is questions that sound forbidding and are not: the first man in space, the wooden horse at Troy, the street where the Great Fire began. Put one of those first so the table scores early.

The best questions produce a debate instead of an answer. Spain was not really formed in 1469: the marriage of Isabella and Ferdinand eventually joined two crowns, neither of them yet reigning in 1469, and the kingdoms kept their own institutions long afterwards. Potsdam is described as a peace settlement with Germany, which it was not — it was an occupation agreement, and the final settlement waited until 1990. Sun Tzu's existence as a single author is disputed by scholars. For a tiebreak, hold back three numeric questions — Kentucky's year of statehood, the year of the Marian reforms, and the date the American colonies began their year on before 1752 — and score them closest guess.

Almost everything a school play teaches about the first Thanksgiving is nineteenth-century furniture. What is documented is thin: two contemporary accounts describe the 1621 harvest gathering at Plymouth — Edward Winslow's letter, printed in Mourt's Relation in 1622, and William Bradford's Of Plymouth Plantation, written years later. Winslow records that four men were sent out fowling and brought back enough to feed the company for most of a week, that Ousamequin, the leader the English called Massasoit, came with some ninety men, that they killed five deer, and that it ran three days. The historian James Baker placed the event between 21 September and 11 November 1621, most likely around Michaelmas at the end of September.

So venison is attested, wild fowl is attested, and the colony's coastal staples of fish, eels and shellfish were the everyday diet. Turkey is not confirmed at the meal, though Bradford mentions a good store of wild turkeys that autumn. There was no pumpkin pie, for want of wheat flour, butter and an oven; no potatoes; and cranberry sauce needs sugar the colony did not have. The colonists did not call it a thanksgiving either — for them a day of thanksgiving was a religious observance, a day of prayer and church-going rather than a dinner. The all-black outfits and buckled hats are later still: capotains never carried buckles, and Augustus Saint-Gaudens carved one onto his 1887 statue The Puritan.

Winslow does not say the Wampanoag were invited. He says they came. The distinction matters, because the picture of a friendly shared dinner flattens a harder story. Tisquantum, the interpreter usually called Squanto, could speak English because Thomas Hunt kidnapped him from Patuxet in 1614 and sold him at Málaga; he got home by way of London and Newfoundland in 1619 to find his village emptied by an epidemic. The alliance of 1621 was diplomacy between a weakened English settlement and a Wampanoag leadership managing its own losses, and within two generations it had collapsed into war. Since 26 November 1970 the United American Indians of New England have held a National Day of Mourning on Cole's Hill in Plymouth, begun after organisers of the colony's 350th anniversary rejected the speech Frank James, an Aquinnah Wampanoag, had prepared for it.

The holiday itself does not descend from 1621. It was built in the nineteenth century, largely by Sarah Josepha Hale — editor of Godey's Lady's Book, and the author of Mary Had a Little Lamb — who campaigned from 1846 onward and wrote to five presidents. Lincoln proclaimed a national day on 3 October 1863 in a text drafted by William Seward, naming the last Thursday in November; it mentions neither the Pilgrims nor 1621. Earlier claimants exist: a thanksgiving service at St Augustine in September 1565, and the charter of Berkeley Hundred in Virginia, which in December 1619 required a yearly day of thanksgiving.

The date moved once more, and badly. In August 1939 Franklin Roosevelt shifted Thanksgiving a week earlier to lengthen the Christmas shopping season, and the country split: twenty-three states and the District of Columbia took the new date, twenty-two kept the old one, and Colorado, Mississippi and Texas observed both. The papers called it Franksgiving. Congress ended the argument with a resolution Roosevelt signed on 26 December 1941, fixing the fourth Thursday in federal law. Canada fixed its own harvest thanksgiving to the second Monday in October in 1957.

The parade is younger than most people assume and was not originally about Thanksgiving at all: Macy's first ran it in 1924 as the Macy's Christmas Parade. Balloons arrived in 1927 with an air-filled Felix the Cat held up on sticks, helium followed in 1928, and for a few years the balloons were released at the end to drift away, with a reward for anyone who returned one. That stopped in 1932 after a pilot came close to crashing while trying to collect one. There was no parade in 1942, 1943 or 1944, the rubber and helium having gone to the war.

The football is older than the coverage that made it national. The Detroit Lions have hosted since 1934, apart from a gap from 1941 to 1944 when the league scheduled no Thanksgiving games at all, after owner George A. Richards used the fixture to sell tickets; the Chicago Bears won that first game 19-16. Dallas took the second slot in 1966 and has kept it every year except 1975 and 1977, when St Louis hosted. A third, prime-time game was added in 2006 with no fixed host.

The turkey pardon is mostly invention, and recent. A turkey has been presented to the president since 1947, but the Truman Library has said plainly that Truman ate at least some of his. Kennedy spared one on 19 November 1963. Reagan was the first to use the word pardon, in 1987; George H. W. Bush made it an annual fixture from 1989. Black Friday has a similar shape: Philadelphia police used the name through the 1950s and 1960s for the traffic and the crowds, and the tidy story about retailers moving from red ink into black was a later improvement, appearing in the Philadelphia Inquirer in 1981.

Two more for the table. Turkey does not make you sleepy on its own — it carries about 0.24 g of tryptophan per 100 g, much what chicken and beef carry, and the drowsiness comes from the size of the meal and the carbohydrates around it. And Benjamin Franklin never proposed the turkey as the national bird; he grumbled about the eagle in a private letter to his daughter, calling the turkey "a much more respectable bird" by comparison. Wild turkeys in the United States, meanwhile, were down to something like 30,000 birds by the late 1930s and now number around seven million.

At a family table the reader matters more than the questions. Pick whoever is happy to be interrupted, keep the answers face down, and give the history behind an answer only after the point is awarded — one line, not a paragraph. At an office party, halve it: two rounds of ten and one closest-guess tiebreak fits inside twenty-five minutes, which is as much as any work event should spend on a quiz. Teams by department make the scoreboard mean something; teams drawn at random make the room mix.

In a classroom the dates round is a ready-made lesson in how history gets simplified — the flying shuttle question with the wrong year, the Canada question with its reversed premise, Spain being "formed" in 1469. The myth section works as a reading task: ask a class to sort the 1621 story into what has a document behind it and what does not. On a video call, read one question at a time and use the chat window as the buzzer, with answers typed but not sent until a count of three. Ten questions is the ceiling before attention drifts.

The short version: teams of three or four, phones down, one marker who is not playing, and three numeric questions held back for a closest-guess tiebreak. Stop while people still want another round.

The quiz is free to play here with no account, and the page prints with the answer key if you would rather work from paper. The Holidays and Events category has the rest of the seasonal sets, including Christmas and Halloween, if the table wants a second round from another corner of the year.