U.S. History trivia quiz

The Game Room
701

I second-guessed myself on several of these
418. Yorktown ?

  1. Erie :smack:

  2. I thought . . . from the Halls of Montezuma referred to the fighting at Monterrey? There was another famous Mexican War battle, that I thought of first, but I will stick with Monterrey.

  3. Shoulda stuck with my first thought Hue :smack: .

702
  1. Also incorrect.
  2. Right!
  3. That’s it, then. You have the correct lyric.
703

Renumbered for consistency, given previous questions of those numbers.

  1. Peter Rodino.
  2. Dunno.
  3. Henry Hyde, recently deceased.
  4. Fr. Robert Drinan.
  5. William Cohen, SecDef in President Clinton’s second term.

Don’t recall a Representative Dunno from the hearings, but otherwise all correct.

Sorry, not sure where those numbers came from.

704

Winding up some old ones I posted:

  1. The globe-trotting architect of the Credit Mobilier corporation was the aptly named George Francis Train.

  2. The Chinese Exclusion Act was passed in 1882.

  3. Satank and Satanta were Kiowas.

  4. The scourge of Trepassey was the infamous Bartholomew Roberts.

  5. The commander of the doomed Whydah was Samuel “Black Sam” Bellamy.

  6. Captain Kidd’s betrayer was Robert Coote, Lord Bellomont.

705

Charles Sandman

706
  1. Why did the Whydah become a name known to people outside of the circle of history buffs in the 20th century?
707

I forgot to mention, Random was right on Morphy and on Gustavus Swift (I was beginning to think nobody would get that one.

Of course, I know the answer to Otaku’s Whydah question, but I’ll give someone else the chance to answer it.

Routes of travelers and trade:

  1. The Great Western Trail, also called the Texas Trail, terminated at what famous Kansas cowtown?

  2. What Lakota Sioux war chief briefly closed the Bozeman Trail to white travelers in the late 1860s?

  3. What cattle drive route led along the Pecos River from Texas through New Mexico, ultimately arriving at Denver, Colorado and Cheyenne, Wyoming?

  4. Where did the Union Pacific and Central Pacific finally meet in 1869 to form the first transcontinental railway?

  5. What cattle trail at one point crossed the Red River and Indian Territory to terminate at Abilene, Kansas?

708
  1. Promontory Point, Utah.

The answers to at least a couple of the “trail” questions are on the tip of my tongue, especially the Texas ones, but I’m refraining from looking them up. Must be getting old. :frowning:

  1. Which president’s wife was the only foreign-born First Lady?
  2. Which president’s wife was the youngest First Lady?

(I know the presidents involved but would have to look up the wives’ names.)

709
  1. Martha Washington (born a British subject). :wink:
    435 (also renumbered). Frances Cleveland. Also the only First Lady to get married in the White House.
710
  1. That can’t be right - just off the top of my head, Abigail Adams (to name just one) would meet the same standard, wouldn’t she?
711

  1. Incorrect. But you sound sure. Hmmm. By foreign-born, I mean born someplace that even still today is not a part of the US. Unless I am drastically mistaken, Martha Washington was born in the colonies in what would be the US after independence. (Specifically, the one I’m thinking of was born in London. She’s the only one, I think, who was born outside what was to become the US.)

  2. Correct (sorry about the misnumbering). She was, I believe, 21 when she married randy ol’ Grover.

712

Yep, and he was defeated for re-election later that year

713

Siam Sam, I was just messin’ with ya about Martha Washington. I knew what you meant. Hence my :wink:

Hollywood takes on space exploration…

  1. This early Bay State rocketry pioneer was thought a kook by some of his neighbors, but was later honored in the naming of a NASA research center. Archival footage of him appeared in the opening credits of Enterprise.
  2. He wrote the book Rocket Boys (later made into the anagram-titled movie October Sky) about growing up in a hardscrabble West Virginia coal town, but followed his dreams and later worked as an engineer on the Space Shuttle program.
  3. This steely-nerved, never-say-die NASA operations director was portrayed by Ed Harris in Apollo 13.
  4. This Cleveland native was the mission commander of the ill-fated Apollo 13, and was played by Tom Hanks in the movie.
  5. This first black female U.S. astronaut made a cameo appearance on Star Trek: The Next Generation.
714

  1. Goddard. And not just his neighbors: the NY Times rather famously mocked him in an editorial. And then ran a retraction some 40 years later, on the occasion of the Moon Landing.

  2. Jim Lovell.

715

That’s a WHOOSH for me. :stuck_out_tongue:

716
  1. Red Cloud
717

Right on both. Robert H. Goddard, IIRC.

718
  1. Homer Hickam
  2. Gene Krantz
719

Yes for both, but I think it’s spelled “Kranz.”

720

Sorry about the delay; I’ve been uber-busy.

Right on.

Also correct!