U.S. History trivia quiz

The Game Room
641

James Michael Curley

642

Correct. He was supposedly the model for the Irish pol in The Last Hurrah.

Notable American jurists…

  1. It was said of him, “When he was a young man, he put on white robes to scare black people; when he was an old man, he put on black robes to scare white people.” Who was he?
  2. This unabashed bigot refused to speak to his Jewish colleagues on the Supreme Court.
  3. Lincoln appointed this key supporter and Illinois state judge to the Supreme Court.
  4. This folksy Southern senator rose to public prominence during the Watergate hearings, and was later appointed to a U.S. court of appeals.
  5. This noted judge with a peculiar name served on a U.S. court of appeals with his brother. The political stars never quite aligned for him to be appointed to the Supreme Court, although many historians think he ought to have been.
643

  1. It was said of him, “When he was a young man, he put on white robes to scare black people; when he was an old man, he put on black robes to scare white people.” Who was he?
    Hugo Black

  2. This unabashed bigot refused to speak to his Jewish colleagues on the Supreme Court.
    William Van deVanter ??

  3. This folksy Southern senator rose to public prominence during the Watergate hearings, and was later appointed to a U.S. court of appeals.
    Sam Ervin

  4. This noted judge with a peculiar name served on a U.S. court of appeals with his brother. The political stars never quite aligned for him to be appointed to the Supreme Court, although many historians think he ought to have been.
    Learned Hand
    Coincidentally, a very similar question to this was asked on a Who Wants to be a Millionaire repeat on GSN, last night.

644

  1. This tiny burg in New England is famous for voting first in national elections?

  2. The first Vice-President to resign his office?

  3. What year was the first polio vaccine announced?

  4. Who is credited with discovering the first oral polio vaccine?

  5. What was the media of the early oral polio vaccines?

645
  1. Correct. Joined the KKK briefly as a young man; later became a liberal stalwart of the Warren Court. I love that joke!
  2. Incorrect.
  3. Correct. Appointed to the 5th Circuit, IIRC, by President Carter.
  4. Correct. What a great name for a judge! His brother’s name was Augustus, BTW.

I don’t watch Millionaire. Great minds must think alike!

646
  1. Hart’s Location, N.H.
  2. John C. Calhoun
647

  1. Hmm- not the one I am thinking about. There is generally a story about this hamlet every four years on the night before or Election Night itself.

  2. Correct, there is another good question re: John C Calhoun but I can’t remember how to phrase it.

648

  1. Dr. Jonas Salk

  2. Sugar cube.
    Now one of my own:

  3. How many US presidents graduated from military academies?

649

Correct on both

  1. 3: Grant, Eisenhower & Carter
650

Correct.

651
  1. I’m just guessing here, but would this be Oliver Wendell Holmes? Who happens to be one of the few Historical US Justices I can name. (The other one being William Howard Taft.)

Another couple of my own.

  1. Speaking of Jimmy Carter, he was a nuclear qualified engineering officer in the US Sub fleet. Can anyone name which of the Navy’s prototype reactor plants he qualified on for his nuke training? (And if you know this, you’ve just proven yourself to be a huge Navy fanboy/girl.)

  2. Around the beginning of the first world war, there was a public catastrophe involving a group of teens going out in an overloaded motor vessel, which then sank in Boston Harbor. All aboard were killed. The M/V shared its name with a popular local soft drink of the era. What was it?
    And to put people out of their misery: The answers to the two unanswered questions I’d posted are:

  1. USS Seawolf. Not the current one, but the first nuclear powered one, laid down approximately the same time as USS Nautilus.

  2. Edward Rowe Snow

652

Cecil says he was involved in cleaning up a reactor meltdown in Canada. Column here. Says it was in Canada,“at the NRX research reactor in Chalk River, Ontario.” Is that it?

653
  1. [The bigoted Supreme Court justice]. No. Holmes had his flaws, but being a bigot wasn’t one of them. In fact, he and Justice Brandeis, who was Jewish, were very good friends.

Notable state governors…

  1. This iron-willed and highly effective governor of a midwestern state secretly sent the GOP minority of his state legislature out of town to deny the Copperhead Democratic majority a quorum. He then ruled the state as a virtual dictator to the end of the Civil War.
  2. This moderate Republican shaved three times a day due to his heavy beard growth, and served as both governor of his large state and as one of its U.S. senators.
  3. A former head of the Peace Corps elected as lieutenant governor to serve with a hostile GOP governor, this liberal Democrat later served two terms as governor of his state in his own right, and then as ambassador to India.
  4. This Democrat was blamed by some for inflaming the Irish immigrants of his state’s biggest city who shortly afterwards rioted against the Federal draft, and was defeated when he later ran for President.
  5. He went on statewide TV, a cigarette dangling from his mouth, to indignantly show pictures of students being turned back by bayonet-wielding U.S. troops during his state’s most notable crisis of the Civil Rights Movement.
654

Siam Sam - Nope, that’s not it. AIUI, the Chalk River incident was a purely Canadian project. The NRX acronym may be suggestive, but I don’t know of any link to that facility and the US Navy’s reactor program. (Which doesn’t mean that there wasn’t a lot of information sharing between NATO nuclear projects in that time.)

BTW, the OP has asked for a moratorium on posting links in the thread - since we’re supposed to be doing this solely from the knowledge we have in our heads already.

655

  1. Is this one still open? 5timechamp said the Ninth wasn’t the one he was thinking of, didn’t he? If so, I’m saying the Third Amendment.

  2. Just on a wild guess, I’m saying Justice McReynolds.

  3. Another wild guess: Samuel Tilden?

656

Oops! Sorry about that. I was thinking of the incident in Cecil’s column and forgot about the moratorium.

657

  1. Correct. Justice James McReynolds, appointed by Woodrow Wilson, who was a raging anti-Semite. And not a very nice person to anyone else, either.

  2. Good guess, but no.

658

Two more hints for this dude, since I realized this might be a little too obscure otherwise. He shared a last name with a President, and he briefly considered a run for the White House himself.

659

Cool, so I can post questions now!

  1. What was the location in Georgia where the Ku Klux Klan was re-established in 1915?

  2. What was the model of handgun that Wild Bill Hickok used to kill Davis Tutt in Springfield, Missouri?

  3. What principal architect of the fraudulent Credit Mobilier corporation went on to make a journey around the world?

  4. In what year was the Chinese Exclusion Act passed?

  5. To what Native American tribe/nation did the chiefs Satank and Satanta belong?

660

  1. Richard Celeste.

  2. Horatio Seymour.