History gauntlet
Every question we've got in History, back to back. How far can you get?
- Question 1 of 12
How settled is the claim that everyone historically slept this way?
Some historians read the textual evidence as more ambiguous, and equatorial hunter-gatherer groups studied today do not clearly show the two-sleep pattern, hinting it may be tied to long, dark, higher-latitude nights.
Read the full answer → - Question 2 of 12
For centuries, the normal way to sleep was in TWO shifts. What sat between the 'first' and 'second' sleep?
Historian A. Roger Ekirch found 2,000+ references, in a dozen languages, to a first and second sleep bridged by a wakeful hour sometimes called 'the watch.' People prayed, read, poked the fire, visited neighbours and turned over fresh dreams.
Read the full answer → - Question 3 of 12
Homer never once calls the sea blue, it's the 'wine-dark' sea. Why didn't ancient languages have a word for blue?
Their eyes matched ours. The 'couldn't see blue' idea is a myth. Blue barely appears in things you can hold and was fiendishly hard to make, so across cultures (Berlin & Kay, 1969) it's nearly always the last basic colour named. Tellingly, Egypt, which made the first synthetic blue, was one of the few with a word for it.
Read the full answer → - Question 4 of 12
What is the status of the 1820 tale of a man eating tomatoes on the Salem courthouse steps?
The Robert Gibbon Johnson courthouse story is unsubstantiated folklore. No contemporary record exists; it was popularised by a Salem postmaster and first written down around 1940, then dramatised with invented dialogue.
Read the full answer → - Question 5 of 12
When did solid science first link smoking to lung cancer, and from whom?
In 1950 both Wynder and Graham (in JAMA) and Doll and Hill (in the BMJ) published studies linking smoking to lung cancer. Doll and Hill's forward-looking study of British doctors then confirmed it around 1954, which made the link very hard to dismiss.
Read the full answer → - Question 6 of 12
How many people are documented as saved by a safety coffin?
There is no documented case of anyone being saved from premature burial by a safety coffin. Despite the patents and sales, the historical record contains no verified rescue.
Read the full answer → - Question 7 of 12
The 'More Doctors Smoke Camels' campaign cited a survey of physicians. What was the trick behind it?
The polling, run through Reynolds' ad agency, frequently meant giving a doctor a free carton of Camels and then asking which brand he smoked. Many named the one they had just been handed, and the method was never properly published.
Read the full answer → - Question 8 of 12
What was the authorities' prescribed 'cure'?
Physicians blamed overheated blood, so they cleared halls, built a stage, and hired pipers and drummers to keep the afflicted moving. It likely made the outbreak worse.
Read the full answer → - Question 9 of 12
So how old is the habit of responding to a sneeze?
Responding to sneezes predates Christianity by centuries. The ancient Greeks treated a sneeze as a message from the gods. Xenophon recorded troops taking one as a good omen around 401 BC, and Romans answered out loud. The pope arrived a thousand years too late to start it.
Read the full answer → - Question 10 of 12
How did George Washington's doctors treat his fatal throat infection in 1799?
They bled him heavily over roughly half a day, a figure often estimated at about 40% of his blood volume, though sources vary. He died that night, and the bleeding very probably did not help.
Read the full answer → - Question 11 of 12
What did Liebowitz and Margolis (1990) conclude about the famous Navy Dvorak study?
In 'The Fable of the Keys' they showed the Navy study was methodologically weak and appears to have been conducted or influenced by August Dvorak himself, who held the patent. So the claim that Dvorak is definitively faster is not established.
Read the full answer → - Question 12 of 12
What argument did the jurist Bartholomew Chassenee famously make for the rats of Autun?
Defending rats prosecuted by an ecclesiastical court, Chassenee argued they could not safely answer the summons because of the danger from cats lying in wait, working the procedure exactly as for a human client.
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// every question here is drawn from our fact-checked quizzes, follow any “read the full answer” link for its sources