Ken Jennings Uncovers Shocking Link Between Famous Historical Figures—Can You Guess What It Is?

Ever wonder what ties together a handful of seemingly random historical figures? It’s the kind of puzzle that tickles the brain—like when your weirdly obsessive aunt quizzes you on trivia at family dinners. Ken Jennings, the Jeopardy! legend and resident quizmaster at Mental Floss, has made a career out of turning curiosity into an art form with his weekly Kennections quizzes. Each one dishes out five trivia questions, and the kicker? The answers all share a sneaky connection. We recently caught up with Ken for an episode of *Amazing Facts with Mental Floss*, where we threw some fascinating historical tidbits his way and challenged him to crack the common thread. Oh, and just when you thought it couldn’t get juicier, Ken dropped the scoop on his new behemoth book, *The Complete Kennections*—a massive vault of trivia puzzles that’s as delightful as it is devilish. Ready to see if you can outwit the quiz king? Dive in… if you dare. LEARN MORE.

Every week on Mental Floss, Ken Jennings writes a Kennections quiz consisting of five trivia questions, the answers of which all have something in common. So we thought that when we sat down with the Jeopardy! host for an all new episode of Amazing Facts with Mental Floss, we’d give him some fascinating facts about historical figures—then challenge him to figure out what they all had in common.

The episode is in honor of Jennings’s new book, The Complete Kennections. “I’ve been writing these weekly Kennections quizzes for Mental Floss for almost a decade now,” he told us. “But a lot of those quizzes, because of the ownership change and just the vagaries of the internet, they’re all kind of lost in the bowels of the web now—you know, somewhere in the Wayback Machine, they’re all trapped, like the Phantom Zone from Superman. And I decided to release all these puzzles in a ginormous new book. There [are] 1000 Kennections trivia puzzles—5000 questions—in this new book, on sale now from Simon and Schuster.”