Ya Wanna Date? #2 Trivia Quiz

Answer: Foundation dates of African kingdoms/empires

Around 750 the camel began to be used as a pack animal. This enabled the Sahara to be opened up as a trade route, primarily for gold and salt, and enabled the establishment of several sub-Saharan empires on strategic points on the route.

The first of these was the Kingdom of Ghana, in the Sahel region just south of the Sahara, which began in the late fourth century AD. The empire, as it became after 750, disappeared sometime after 1075-76, when the Muslim Berbers launched a jihad against it.

The Kingdom of Mali in West Africa included the city of Timbuktu. It seems to have taken over the gold and salt trade from the Ghanaian kingdom. Officially Muslim, Mali was characterised by religious tolerance. From about the middle of the fourteenth century Mali weakened, eventurally to be taken over by the last of the kingdoms founded on trans-Saharan trade, Songhai.

The Songhai people were tributaries of the empire of Mali, but in the late 14th century they gained their independence and then gradually took Mali over and expanded it to become one of the largest empires of the time, covering an area larger than all the contemporaneous European states combined and containing several thousand cultures. One of its great cities was the aforementioned Timbuktu, a key post on the gold/salt trade route, with a population of 100,000. According to http://www.geocities.com/CollegePark/Classroom/9912/ancientsonghay.html, "Students from various parts of the world came to Timbuctu's famous University of Sankore to study Law and Medicine. Medieval Europe sent emissaries to the University of Sankore to witness its excellent libraries with manuscripts and to cosult [sic] with the learned mathematicians, astronomers, physicians, and jurists whose intellectual endeavors were said to be paid for out of the king's own treasury." In 1591 the musket-armed Moroccan Berbers, drawn by the gold mines, invaded, and the empire, already in decline, quickly fell apart.

Around 1200 the Kanuri people of Kanem launched wars of conquest against their neighbours and integrated them into an empire. In the early 15th century the empire's centre of gravity shifted from Kanem to Bornu, and profited from the collapse of Songhai. In 1846 the Hausa states finally finished the Kanem-Bornu empire off.

Shaka (1785-1828) became leader of the Zulu people around 1820 and created the Zulu empire, which at its height during his reign stretched from South Africa to Tanzania. He was a cruel man; his empire was founded on the bodies of an estimated two million people. After his death the empire suffered at the hands of the Boers and then the British, who finally broke it up around 1880 and annexed Zululand in 1887.

I wanted this question to include Great Zimbabwe, but it proves too difficult to pin its foundation date down even to the century. The area was populated by about AD400, but it wasn't until about AD1000 that the ancestors of the region's Shona people began building the great stone buildings and walls, without cement, that still stand there. The ruins cover 1,800 acres and are the largest ruins in Africa. They are the firmest of many powerful refutations of the racist 19th century European-American view that the Africans were a degenerate race incapable of civilization. This site, Great Zimbabwe, was, until Zimbabwean independence in 1980, despoiled by archaeologists digging down to find the "original white" foundations - and, needless to say, finding none but destroying much valuable black history in the process.

Answer: Publication dates of important socialist works

Proudhon published "What is Property?" (and concluded that "property is theft") in 1840, Marx and Engels their "Communist Manifesto" ("A spectre is haunting Europe - the spectre of Communism", and the famous misquote: "Workers of the world, unite - you have nothing to lose but your chains") in 1848, and Marx "Das Kapital" in 1867. (I don't think there are any bite-sized quotes in that erudite tome, and I'm not prepared to read the whole thing to find one).

With my decided anarchist sympathies, I would have liked to include many other seminal works such as Kropotkin's "Mutual Aid", but that'll have to wait for a specialist anarchist quiz.

Answer: 1868 and 1890

The common factor is Spain. In the revolution of 1868, universal male suffrage was introduced, but was limited by the constitution of 1876. In 1890 it was reintroduced by a new regime.

France and Switzerland both introduced it in 1848, while the Austrian provinces of the Habsburg Empire did so in 1907.

You'll note that this only refers to the introduction of universal MALE suffrage. Full universal suffrage in these countries was introduced as follows: Austria 1918 (following the Habsburg Empire's defeat in World War I), Spain 1931, France 1944, Switzerland 1990. That's right, 1990!

Answer: Invention dates of common objects

Respectively: paper money (China); the button and buttonhole (Europe); shoelaces (the first recorded use of string and shoe holes was in England on March 27th 1790, if you're absolutely desperate to know); and the ballpoint pen, by the Hungarian Laszlo Biro.

Answer: Important US Supreme Court cases regarding relations between blacks and whites

1856 saw the Dredd Scott decision, in which the Court reinforced slavery and declared that Negroes were "beings of an inferior order". In the Civil Rights Cases in 1883, the Court decided that Congress did not have the authority to impose the Civil Rights Act of 1875 on private as opposed to public institutions; in effect, it opened the way for legally sanctioned racial discrimination.

In 1896 it decided in the Plessy v Ferguson case on the "separate but equal" doctrine that enshrined in law segregation of public facilities; it reversed this decision unanimously in Brown v Board of Education of Topeka in 1954, which repudiated the idea that separate could mean equal, and mandated integrated schools.

Answer: Years in which planets were discovered (or correctly identified)

The planets and their discovers are, in order: Uranus, by William Herschel; Neptune, by Johann Galle; and Pluto, by Clyde Tombaugh.

Answer: Dates of codifications of various major team sports

No, I don't stutter. In 1845 rugby's rules were first codified by three boys at Rugby School, Warwickshire, England. In that same year the first rules of baseball were published by Alexander Cartwright. 1859 saw the first set of rules for Australian Rules football drawn up in Melbourne, while the rules for basketball were written by Dr James Naismith in 1891 to keep the young men at the YMCA, where he was minister, occupied indoors during those long New England winters.

P.S. The story about William Webb Ellis starting the game of rugby in 1823 by picking up the ball during a game of football at Rugby School in Warwickshire, England, is almost certainly apocryphal. Apart from anything else, the rules of football at the time allowed a certain amount of handling.

Answer: Publication dates of landmark English dictionaries

Doctor Samuel Johnson published his famous dictionary in 1755. It wasn't the first; a 3,000-word English dictionary had been published in 1606 and a much more comprehensive one in 1656.

Noah Webster first published his work in 1806. In the US the word "Webster" subsequently became synonymous with "dictionary", and today any dictionary can use the word "Webster" in its title.

The first fascicle (i.e. part 1) of the Oxford English Dictionary (original title: "A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles; Founded Mainly on the Materials Collected by The Philological Society") was published by Oxford University Press in 1884; the editor, James Murray, had by that time realised that the Society's original 10-year time frame for the work was grossly inadequate. The work was only published in full in 1928, and has been kept up to date since then by new editions and supplements and, latterly, by being available online.

Answer: Foundation dates of selected cities

In order, they are:

Rome (the legendary foundation by the twins Romulus and Remus, although an alternative legend relates to Aeneas, who according to Virgil's "Aenid" fled Troy when it was sacked by the Greeks and founded the city whose empire would eventually include Greece - nice irony, that).

New York (from the Dutch incorporation in 1625 as Nieuw Amsterdam, which the city has since 1975 celebrated as its foundation).

Singapore (founded when the British led by Stamford Raffles recognised a certain ruler as Sultan of Johor in exchange for his permission to build a trading post).

Canberra (a planned city, it was a compromise between Sydney and Melbourne as to what Australia's capital city should be).

Brasilia (likewise a planned city, built in four years to be Brazil's capital).

Answer: Projected, attempted or successful invasions of Britain

I hope the date 1798 threw some of you off. In that year, an uprising against British rule occurred in Ireland, organised by the United Irishmen led by Wolfe Tone, who sought help from Britain's enemy of the time, revolutionary France. On 22nd August France landed a force of 1,000 soldiers in Ireland; this force was initally successful, but was finally defeated by British troops, who went on to ruthlessly crush the rebellion. On 12th October a larger French force of 3,000 belatedly attempted to land in Ireland, but was forced to surrender by a Royal Navy squadron.

The other years refer respectively to the Roman invasion led by the emperor Claudius, William the Conqueror's Norman invasion, the Spanish Armada (and yes, the Spanish were trying to invade, by using the Armada as an escort for the invading army from the Spanish Netherlands) and Hitler's projected invasion. Regarding the latter, the Battle of Britain was a precursor to the planned invasion; historical debate continues as to just how serious Hitler's attempt was, but he did assemble an invasion fleet of barges which probably would have sailed if the Germans had won command of the air, and which the British took seriously enough to bomb.