150 Fun Facts About American History

What was the XYZ Affair of 1797-1798?

French agents demanded bribes from US envoys, and when the envoys' dispatches were published, the uproar led to the undeclared Quasi-War.

What was the purpose of the Freedmen's Bureau, established in 1865?

Aid formerly enslaved people and refugees was its mission, and its agents also performed marriages for freed couples whose unions slavery had never made legal.

The Compromise of 1877 ended Reconstruction because President Hayes did what?

Withdrew the last federal troops from the South, historians largely agree: Hayes pulled the soldiers guarding the last Republican statehouses, and Democrats took over those states.

What was the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution (1964)?

Congress's grant of war powers to Johnson followed alleged attacks on US Navy ships; with no declaration of war, he used it to escalate the Vietnam War.

What were the 1917 Espionage Act and 1918 Sedition Act used to do?

Silence critics of the war was their use: Socialist Eugene V. Debs got a ten-year sentence for an anti-war speech and ran for president from his prison cell in 1920.

What was the Lend-Lease Act of 1941?

Supplying Allied nations with materiel before US entry was the aim, and the president sold it by likening it to lending a neighbor your garden hose to put out a house fire.

What did the Supreme Court rule in the Dred Scott case?

Black Americans could not be citizens, Chief Justice Roger Taney wrote; he hoped the ruling would settle the slavery question, but it pushed the nation closer to civil war.

Which Supreme Court case established the principle of judicial review?

Marbury v. Madison had a twist: the Court said William Marbury deserved his commission, yet refused to order its delivery because the law giving it that power was unconstitutional.

What was the Dawes Act of 1887?

A law splitting tribal lands into individual allotments, the Dawes Act sold the 'surplus' left after allotment to white settlers, and tribes lost vast acreage.

What was the Teapot Dome scandal of the 1920s?

Bribes for secret leases of federal oil reserves sent Interior Secretary Albert Fall to prison, yet oilman Edward Doheny was acquitted of paying the bribe Fall took.

Which treaty ended the Mexican-American War and ceded vast territories to the United States?

The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was negotiated by Nicholas Trist in defiance of President Polk's order recalling him, yet Polk still sent it to the Senate.

What was the significance of Shays' Rebellion (1786-1787)?

It exposed the Articles of Confederation's weakness, and many leaders cited the farmers' uprising as proof a stronger national constitution was needed.

E.D. Nixon, who made Rosa Parks's arrest a test case, led Montgomery's chapter of which group?

E.D. Nixon had led the Montgomery NAACP, and he and white lawyer Clifford Durr bailed Parks out of jail before helping launch the bus boycott.

What was the Homestead Act of 1862?

A law granting 160 acres to settlers who farmed it, the Homestead Act passed only after the Southern states seceded and their lawmakers left Congress.

What was the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794?

Farmers defying a federal excise tax on whiskey in western Pennsylvania fled when a 13,000-man militia army marched west, and the revolt collapsed without a battle.

What did the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 primarily target?

Immigrants and critics of the federal government were the targets, and Congressman Matthew Lyon, jailed under the Sedition Act, won re-election from his cell.

What was the Underground Railroad's purpose?

Helping enslaved people escape to the North and Canada was its work, and Harriet Tubman made about 13 trips back into Maryland to lead people out.

Which constitutional compromise determined how enslaved people counted toward a state's representation?

The Three-Fifths Compromise counted three of every five enslaved people toward a state's House seats and direct taxes, boosting slave states' power in the House.

Who was the commanding general of the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War?

George Washington led the army through the whole war, then handed his commission back to Congress in December 1783 instead of keeping command.

Why did the 1777 Battle of Saratoga matter?

It brought France into the war: after a whole British army surrendered at Saratoga, France signed a treaty of alliance with the United States in February 1778.

D-Day, the Allied invasion of Normandy, took place on what date?

June 6, 1944 became D-Day because storms forced Eisenhower to postpone the landings by a day, after forecasters predicted a brief break in the weather.

What was the significance of the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848?

It was the first women's rights convention, and its call for the vote nearly got dropped until Frederick Douglass spoke up for keeping it.

What economic crisis began with the stock market crash of October 1929?

The Great Depression followed, and so many banks failed that Congress created the FDIC in 1933 to insure deposits and restore trust in banks.

What was the primary reason the United States entered World War I?

German U-boat attacks and the Zimmermann Telegram did it: the intercepted telegram offered Mexico the chance to win back Texas, New Mexico and Arizona by joining Germany.

Which amendment gave women the right to vote in the United States?

The 19th Amendment's last needed ratification hinged on 24-year-old legislator Harry Burn, who switched to yes after his mother wrote urging him to.

Which U.S. President resigned from office due to the Watergate scandal?

Richard Nixon resigned less than two years after winning re-election by carrying 49 of the 50 states.

What was the main goal of the Marshall Plan after World War II?

To rebuild Western European economies was the aim, and the offer was open to the Soviet bloc too, but Stalin refused and kept his satellites out.

Who assassinated President Abraham Lincoln?

John Wilkes Booth, a famous stage actor, fled Ford's Theatre on horseback and was on the run for days until Union soldiers cornered him in a barn and shot him.

What did the Monroe Doctrine (1823) primarily warn European nations against?

Further colonization in the Americas was banned, but the young US lacked the navy to enforce the doctrine and could only back it up by the late 1800s.

What was the Trail of Tears?

The forced removal of Native nations from the Southeast sent the Cherokee and other nations west, and thousands died of exposure, disease and starvation.

Which July 1863 battle ended Robert E. Lee's second invasion of the North?

Battle of Gettysburg's last day brought Pickett's Charge, a mass Confederate assault on the Union center that was thrown back with devastating losses.

Whose 1775 midnight ride did Henry Wadsworth Longfellow turn into a famous poem?

Paul Revere never finished that ride: a British patrol caught him before Concord, while fellow rider Samuel Prescott escaped and carried the alarm on.

What was the Lewis and Clark Expedition's goal?

To find a water route to the Pacific was the goal, but the explorers found the Rocky Mountains far higher and wider than expected, with no easy portage between rivers.

Which March on Washington speaker improvised his most famous passage?

Martin Luther King Jr. set aside his text for a 'dream' refrain he had used many times before, including in a Detroit speech two months earlier.

Which pamphlet urged American colonists to break with Britain in January 1776?

Common Sense quickly became one of America's best-selling works, yet its author, Paine, never made money from it.

What was the Boston Tea Party (1773) a protest against?

Taxation without representation was the grievance, even though the Tea Act made legal tea cheaper; colonists saw buying it as accepting Parliament's tax on tea.

What did the Supreme Court decide in Brown versus Board of Education?

It declared school segregation unconstitutional, holding separate schools 'inherently unequal', which partly overturned the 'separate but equal' rule of Plessy v. Ferguson.

Which US president, in office less than four months, authorised the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945?

Harry S. Truman had been kept in the dark about the atomic bomb project as vice president and was only told about it after he took office.

What was the first permanent English settlement in America?

Jamestown nearly failed: only about 60 settlers lived through the 1609-10 'starving time' winter.

Who served as president of the Confederate States of America?

Jefferson Davis was held two years at Fort Monroe, and his $100,000 bail was posted partly by Northerners such as Horace Greeley and Cornelius Vanderbilt.

Who wrote the Declaration of Independence?

Thomas Jefferson's draft lost a passage blaming King George III for the slave trade, which Congress cut to avoid alienating Southern delegates.

What was the name of the ship that brought the Pilgrims to America in 1620?

The Mayflower was meant to sail with a second ship, the Speedwell, but it sprang leak after leak and was left behind in England.

Which President issued the Emancipation Proclamation?

Abraham Lincoln's proclamation freed no one in the loyal border slave states such as Kentucky and Maryland, because it covered only areas in rebellion.

Which fort's bombardment in April 1861 opened the Civil War?

Fort Sumter fell without a single combat death, and the war's first fatalities came afterward, when a gun exploded during the Union's surrender salute.

What amendment to the Constitution abolished slavery?

The 13th Amendment, ratified in December 1865, abolished slavery and involuntary servitude throughout the United States, except as punishment for a crime.

Whose 1775 speech is remembered for ending 'Give me liberty, or give me death!'?

Patrick Henry's famous words were first printed in 1817, when biographer William Wirt reconstructed the speech from elderly witnesses' memories.

Who was the President of the United States during most of World War II?

Franklin D. Roosevelt won an unprecedented fourth term in 1944, and that long tenure led to the 22nd Amendment's two-term limit.

Which territory did the United States buy from France in 1803?

Louisiana nearly doubled the country's size, though France had only just taken it back from Spain in a secret treaty three years earlier.

On what date did Japan attack Pearl Harbor, bringing the U.S. into World War II?

December 7, 1941 was the date, yet the attack missed its most prized targets: all three Pacific Fleet aircraft carriers were away from Pearl Harbor.

Which president of the Continental Congress left the biggest signature on the Declaration of Independence?

John Hancock supposedly signed big so the British king could read it without spectacles, but that popular story is only a legend.

Which Arthur Miller play is set in Salem?

The Crucible likened McCarthy-era hearings to the 1692 witch hunt, and Miller, convicted of contempt of Congress for refusing to name names, saw the verdict overturned in 1958.

Which Dutch colonial town did the English seize in 1664 and rename New York?

New Amsterdam gave up without a shot: its residents refused to fight, against the wishes of director-general Peter Stuyvesant.

Which future president defended the British soldiers tried for the 1770 Boston Massacre?

John Adams won acquittals for six of the soldiers, while two were convicted of manslaughter and branded on the thumb.

Which foreign officer drilled the Continental Army at Valley Forge in 1778?

Baron von Steuben spoke little English, so he wrote the drills in French and aides translated them into English each night.

Which British general's army was trapped and defeated at Yorktown in 1781?

Charles Cornwallis pleaded illness and skipped the surrender ceremony, sending his deputy Charles O'Hara to hand over his sword.

The 1787 Northwest Ordinance made which waterway the free–slave dividing line?

The Ohio River bounded the territory where the ordinance banned slavery, yet the same clause let slaveholders reclaim fugitives who crossed into it.

Aaron Burr fatally shot Alexander Hamilton in an 1804 duel held in which town?

Weehawken, New Jersey, was the site, and Burr was charged with murder in New York and New Jersey but never tried, and he finished his term as vice president.

Francis Scott Key wrote 'The Star-Spangled Banner' after the bombardment of which fort?

McHenry withstood the British bombardment, and Key's poem 'Defence of Fort M'Henry' was later set to the tune of a London gentlemen's club song.

Which War of 1812 clash was fought 15 days after the peace treaty had been signed?

The Battle of New Orleans was fought on January 8, 1815; news of the Treaty of Ghent, signed December 24, had not crossed the Atlantic, and the United States ratified it only in February 1815.

The Missouri Compromise let Missouri in as a slave state while admitting which free state?

Maine, until then part of Massachusetts, entered as a free state so the Senate stayed balanced between free and slave states.

Which waterway, completed in 1825, linked the Hudson River to the Great Lakes?

The Erie Canal was mocked as 'Clinton's Ditch' before it opened, then slashed the cost of moving goods between the Great Lakes region and the coast.

Jean Baptiste Charbonneau was the baby son of which Lewis and Clark Expedition member?

Sacagawea carried her baby on the journey, and Clark, who nicknamed him Pomp, later became his guardian and backed his schooling.

The 1836 siege of the Alamo was fought at a mission in which present-day city?

San Antonio's Alamo fell to Santa Anna, and on April 21 Texians charging his camp at San Jacinto yelled 'Remember the Alamo!'

Who led the Texian army to victory at San Jacinto in a battle lasting 18 minutes?

Sam Houston's army routed Santa Anna at San Jacinto, and Santa Anna, captured the next day, signed treaties that ended the fighting.

Gold was discovered in January 1848 at which California sawmill?

Sutter's Mill's gold ruined John Sutter: his workers quit for the diggings, and crowds of gold seekers overran his land and wrecked his buildings.

Which island did the 1846 Oregon Treaty leave entirely British?

Vancouver Island stayed wholly British though it reaches south of the 49th parallel, and vague channel wording set off the 1859 Pig War over the San Juan Islands.

Which senator drafted the 1854 Kansas–Nebraska Act, which let settlers vote on slavery?

Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois drafted the act; its popular-sovereignty formula ignited 'Bleeding Kansas' and sparked the founding of the Republican Party.

John Brown's 1859 raid seized a federal armory in which town?

Harpers Ferry's armory was retaken by US Marines under the overall command of Robert E. Lee, and Brown was captured, tried and executed.

Where did Lee surrender his army to Grant on April 9, 1865?

Appomattox hosted the surrender in Wilmer McLean's house, and McLean had moved there after the war's first major battle raged across his farm at Bull Run.

Sherman's March to the Sea ended in December 1864 with the capture of which port?

Sherman telegraphed the president offering Savannah as a Christmas gift, along with 150 heavy guns and about 25,000 bales of cotton.

Who was the first US president to be impeached by the House of Representatives?

Andrew Johnson was impeached in 1868 for defying the Tenure of Office Act, and the Senate fell a single vote short of removing him.

Which Secretary of State negotiated the 1867 purchase of Alaska from Russia?

William H. Seward's deal was mocked as 'Seward's Folly' and 'Seward's Icebox' by critics who thought Alaska was useless land.

In which territory was the golden spike driven to complete the transcontinental railroad?

Utah Territory's Promontory Summit had the golden spike only for the ceremony: it was swapped for an ordinary iron spike and now sits in a Stanford University museum.

Which 7th Cavalry commander was killed at the Battle of the Little Bighorn?

George Armstrong Custer split his regiment before attacking, and all five companies he kept under his own command were wiped out.

Which president was shot by Charles Guiteau at a Washington railroad station in 1881?

James A. Garfield's doctors probed his wound with unsterilized fingers hunting for the bullet, likely spreading infection, and Alexander Graham Bell even built a metal detector to find it.

President McKinley was shot in 1901 at the Pan-American Exposition in which city?

Buffalo's Pan-American Exposition had an X-ray machine on display, but doctors never used it to find the bullet, and McKinley died of gangrene.

Which French sculptor designed the Statue of Liberty?

Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi designed it, but pedestal funds ran out until Joseph Pulitzer's New York World urged the public to give, raising over $100,000, mostly in gifts of a dollar or less.

Annie Moore, the first immigrant processed at Ellis Island in 1892, came from where?

Ireland's Annie Moore was long confused with a Texas woman of the same name, until genealogists showed that woman was born in Illinois.

The Pony Express carried mail between Sacramento and which Missouri town?

The Pony Express ran from St. Joseph, Missouri, to Sacramento for just 18 months before the transcontinental telegraph, completed in October 1861, made it obsolete.

Which US Navy ship sank in Havana Harbor in February 1898, pushing the nation toward war?

The USS Maine's sinking was blamed on Spain at the time, but the cause is still debated, and an accidental coal-bunker fire is a leading explanation.

Which future president led the Rough Riders at the Battle of San Juan Hill in 1898?

Theodore Roosevelt had quit as assistant secretary of the Navy to fight in Cuba, and the fame that followed helped elect him governor of New York that year.

The Wright brothers' four powered flights on December 17, 1903 are forever linked with which North Carolina town?

Kitty Hawk gets the credit, but the flights took place at Kill Devil Hills, about four miles to the south.

Why did so many workers die in the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire?

Locked doors, which the owners said stopped theft, trapped the workers, and the disaster led to tougher fire and factory safety laws.

The 1925 Scopes 'Monkey Trial' over teaching evolution was held in which state?

Tennessee's case ended with John Scopes convicted and fined $100, but the verdict was later overturned on a technicality.

What was the name of the plane Charles Lindbergh flew nonstop to Paris in 1927?

The Spirit of St. Louis had no front windshield, since a big fuel tank sat ahead of the pilot, so Lindbergh looked out the side windows or used a periscope.

Which New Deal program put young unmarried men to work in forests and parks?

The Civilian Conservation Corps planted about three billion trees, and a smaller parallel program ran camps for unemployed young women.

What name was given in 1930s California to Dust Bowl migrant farm workers?

'Okies', after Oklahoma, was stuck on migrants from across the Southern Plains, and John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath followed one such family, the Joads.

Which general led the troops that cleared the Bonus Army from the capital in 1932?

Douglas MacArthur, then Army chief of staff, sent infantry, cavalry and six tanks against the marchers, World War I veterans demanding early payment of their bonus.

The airship Hindenburg burned in 1937 while docking at a naval air station in which town?

The Hindenburg burst into flames while docking at Lakehurst, killing 36 people, though most of those on board survived.

Which Army division was sent to escort the Little Rock Nine into Central High in 1957?

Eisenhower sent in the 101st Airborne and put the entire Arkansas National Guard under federal command, taking it out of Governor Faubus's hands.

Which civil rights group organized the first 1961 Freedom Ride from Washington, D.C.?

CORE, the Congress of Racial Equality, launched the ride from Washington on May 4, 1961, and near Anniston, Alabama, a mob firebombed one of its buses.

Which Soviet leader agreed to pull nuclear missiles out of Cuba to end the 1962 crisis?

Khrushchev pulled the missiles out, and in a secret side deal the United States agreed to remove its own nuclear missiles from Turkey.

The failed 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion tried to overthrow which leader?

Fidel Castro's forces beat the CIA-trained exiles within three days, and he later released 1,113 captured invaders in exchange for food and medicine.

Who was the second person to walk on the Moon?

Buzz Aldrin got his nickname from a sister who mispronounced 'brother' as 'buzzer', and in 1988 he made Buzz his legal first name.

The 1969 Stonewall riots began at a bar in which New York City neighborhood?

Greenwich Village's Stonewall Inn raid set off the riots, and their first anniversary in 1970 brought the first pride marches in New York and Los Angeles.

Kent State's May 1970 protest, ended by National Guard gunfire, opposed which Vietnam War move?

Invading Cambodia set off the protest, and after the shootings students at hundreds of campuses walked out in a nationwide strike.

Which president's inauguration day in 1981 brought the release of the American hostages in Iran?

Reagan had been sworn in only minutes before the hostages were freed, although the deal releasing them had been signed the day before, under Carter.

Which teacher died aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger in 1986?

Christa McAuliffe's backup, Barbara Morgan, went back to teaching in Idaho, then was picked as an astronaut in 1998 and flew to space in 2007.

The Iran–Contra affair funneled arms-sale profits to rebels fighting in which country?

The Contras were fighting Nicaragua's Sandinista government; Congress had barred funding them through the Boland Amendments, so the administration secretly used arms-sale proceeds.

The 1995 Oklahoma City bombing destroyed a federal building named after whom?

The Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building attack killed 168 people, and Timothy McVeigh timed it for the second anniversary of the end of the Waco siege.

Which upholsterer is credited, in a story her grandson first told in 1870, with sewing the first Stars and Stripes?

Betsy Ross has no archival evidence behind the tale, which surfaced a century after the fact. She did make flags for the Pennsylvania Navy during the Revolution.

Which Midwestern city lost about 17,000 buildings in an 1871 fire long blamed on Catherine O'Leary's cow?

Chicago's city council formally exonerated Catherine O'Leary in 1997, 126 years after the blaze. The fire killed about 300 people and left roughly 100,000 homeless.

Which Continental Army general plotted in 1780 to hand the fort at West Point to the British for £20,000?

Benedict Arnold had been a hero of the 1777 Battles of Saratoga, where leg wounds kept him out of combat for years. He ended the war as a brigadier general in the British Army.

Which woman, nicknamed Moses, escaped slavery in Maryland and then made some 13 missions to rescue about 70 others?

Harriet Tubman later guided the Civil War raid at Combahee Ferry, which liberated more than 700 people. She said she never lost a passenger.

Which infielder, signed by Dodgers executive Branch Rickey, broke Major League Baseball's color line in April 1947?

Jackie Robinson's number 42 was retired across every Major League team in 1997, a first for any professional athlete. Every player now wears it each April 15.

Which aviator became the first woman to fly solo nonstop across the Atlantic, then vanished over the Pacific in 1937?

Amelia Earhart disappeared while trying to become the first female pilot to circle the globe. She was declared dead in January 1939, a year and a half after she went missing.

What name was given to the illicit bars, also called blind pigs, that boomed while alcohol was banned from 1920 to 1933?

Speakeasies date back to at least the 1880s, long before national Prohibition. A similar phrase, "speak easy shop", appears in a British naval memoir written in 1844.

Mount Rushmore, carved between 1927 and 1941 under sculptor Gutzon Borglum, stands in the Black Hills of which state?

South Dakota's state historian came up with the idea for the carving. Borglum named it the Shrine of Democracy and gave each of its four heads a height of 60 feet.

In which Texas city was John F. Kennedy shot while riding in a presidential motorcade in November 1963?

Dallas's Parkland Memorial Hospital pronounced Kennedy dead about 30 minutes after the shooting. He had spent the previous night at the Hotel Texas in Fort Worth.

Which fictional factory worker, born in a 1942 song, came to represent American women in World War II war plants?

Rosie the Riveter began as a tune by Redd Evans and John Jacob Loeb. She went on to become perhaps the most widely recognized icon of the wartime home front.

In which city did delegates meet in 1787 to draft the Constitution, in the hall where independence was declared?

Philadelphia hosted the convention in the Pennsylvania State House, later renamed Independence Hall. Rhode Island was the only state that refused to send delegates.

What name is given to the Constitution's first ten amendments, ratified in 1791 to answer Anti-Federalist objections?

The Bill of Rights began as twelve articles sent to the states in 1789. One of the two left behind finally became the Twenty-seventh Amendment in 1992.

Which British law of 1765 taxed colonists' newspapers, legal documents and playing cards until its repeal a year later?

The Stamp Act charged a shilling on every pack of cards and ten shillings on dice. Parliament repealed it in March 1766 but declared it could still legislate for the colonies.

Which phrase, credited to editor John O'Sullivan in 1845, held that the United States was meant to span the continent?

Manifest Destiny was used to justify the annexation of Texas in 1845 and the Oregon boundary dispute a year later. O'Sullivan went on to become a propagandist for the Confederacy.

Which Civil War nurse and former Patent Office clerk founded the American Red Cross at a meeting in her apartment?

Clara Barton was called the Angel of the Battlefield after helping an overwhelmed surgeon at Cedar Mountain in 1862. Her Patent Office salary had equalled a man's.

Which frontiersman and former congressman, nicknamed King of the Wild Frontier, died at the Battle of the Alamo in 1836?

Davy Crockett left angrily for Texas after narrowly losing his seat in Congress in 1835. He joined the Texas Revolution early the next year.

What nickname was given to the roughly 300,000 fortune seekers who rushed to California after gold was found there?

Forty-niners were named for 1849, the peak year of the rush. About half of them arrived by sea and half came overland.

Which antislavery novel, first serialized in an abolitionist weekly, sold 300,000 American copies in its first year?

Uncle Tom's Cabin was the best-selling novel of the 1800s in the United States, behind only the Bible among all books. It ran for 40 weeks in The National Era before appearing in book form.

Which abolitionist orator escaped slavery disguised in a sailor's uniform and later founded the paper The North Star?

Frederick Douglass launched the paper with £500 given to him by English supporters. Its motto began "Right is of no sex, Truth is of no color".

Which federal holiday marks the 1865 day a Union general landed at Galveston to enforce the end of slavery in Texas?

Juneteenth takes its name, first used in the 1890s, from June and nineteenth. It became a federal holiday in 2021.

Which September 1862 battle, fought along a Maryland creek, remains the bloodiest day in American history?

Antietam left nearly 23,000 dead, wounded or missing on both sides. In the South it is often called the Battle of Sharpsburg, after the nearby town.

Which Union ironclad, known for its revolving gun turret, fought the Confederate ship Virginia at Hampton Roads in 1862?

USS Monitor fought the Virginia to a stalemate, then foundered under tow in a storm off Cape Hatteras on the last day of that year.

Up to 300 Lakota people were killed by US cavalry in December 1890 beside which creek on the Pine Ridge Reservation?

Wounded Knee followed a failed attempt to disarm the Lakota at their camp. Twenty-five soldiers were also killed and 39 wounded.

Which Apache leader surrendered for the last time in 1886 and later appeared in a presidential inauguration parade?

Geronimo surrendered three times in all and was exhibited at an 1898 exposition in Omaha. He died at Fort Sill in 1909, still a prisoner of war.

Which Scottish-born steel magnate gave away almost 90 percent of his fortune, much of it to build local libraries?

Andrew Carnegie handed out around $350 million to charities, foundations and universities in the last 18 years of his life. World peace was another of his causes.

Which West Coast city was more than 80% destroyed in April 1906 by a magnitude 7.9 earthquake and days of fire?

San Francisco lost more than 3,000 people in the disaster. The quake struck at 5:12 in the morning, and the fires that followed burned for several days.

Which 1896 Supreme Court ruling upheld segregated railcars under the doctrine later known as "separate but equal"?

Plessy v. Ferguson was decided 7–1 against Homer Plessy, a mixed-race man who had deliberately boarded a whites-only train car to test the law.

The United States took over a failed French canal effort in 1904 and opened the waterway in 1914 across which country?

Panama saw about 1,000 ships pass through in the opening year. Ferdinand de Lesseps, the diplomat behind the Suez route, had driven the earlier French attempt.

Which president was the leading architect of the League of Nations, yet saw the United States stay out of it?

Woodrow Wilson rejected a Republican compromise that would have let the Senate ratify the Treaty of Versailles. A stroke in October 1919 left him incapacitated.

Which suffragist was arrested in her hometown of Rochester, New York, in 1872 for voting when only men legally could?

Susan B. Anthony became the first female citizen shown on American coinage when her portrait appeared on the 1979 dollar coin.

Which Colorado River dam on the Nevada–Arizona border, built from 1931 to 1936, was once officially named Boulder Dam?

Hoover Dam was the name Congress used in its funding bills, and the name it reinstated in 1947. In between, the structure officially went by Boulder Dam for 14 years.

Which secret wartime program, with a laboratory at Los Alamos led by Robert Oppenheimer, built the first atomic bombs?

The Manhattan Project employed nearly 130,000 people at its peak and cost nearly $2 billion. Its two wartime bomb designs were called Little Boy and Fat Man.

Which naval battle of June 1942, six months after Pearl Harbor, saw all four Japanese fleet carriers present sunk?

Midway turned when American planes caught the Japanese carriers just as they were rearming and refueling. It came one month after the Battle of the Coral Sea.

On which Pacific island did Joe Rosenthal photograph six Marines raising the American flag atop Mount Suribachi in 1945?

Iwo Jima brought Rosenthal the 1945 Pulitzer Prize for Photography. His picture ran in Sunday newspapers just two days after he took it.

Which five-star general commanded Operation Overlord on D-Day and later launched the Interstate Highway System?

Dwight Eisenhower also ran Columbia University and served as the first supreme commander of NATO before he won the presidency.

Which Soviet satellite, launched in October 1957, set off a crisis in the United States and triggered the Space Race?

Sputnik 1 sent radio beeps back to Earth for three weeks before its silver-zinc batteries ran down. It was the first artificial satellite to circle the planet.

Which Muslim minister, a Nation of Islam spokesman until 1964, was assassinated in New York City in February 1965?

Malcolm X chose the X to stand for his unknown African ancestral surname. He was about to address a 400-person audience at the Audubon Ballroom when he was shot.

Which Wisconsin senator, whose name became a byword for anti-communist witch hunts, was censured by the Senate in 1954?

Joseph McCarthy was censured by a vote of 67–22, making him one of the few senators ever disciplined that way. He had been a Marine intelligence officer in World War II.

Which Alabama city was the starting point of three 1965 voting rights marches along a 54-mile highway to Montgomery?

Selma's first march ended on Bloody Sunday, when state troopers charged about 600 unarmed protesters who had just crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge.

Which nuclear plant on Pennsylvania's Susquehanna River suffered a partial reactor meltdown in March 1979?

Three Mile Island remains the worst accident in US commercial nuclear power history, yet its small radioactive releases had no detectable health effects on workers or the public.

Which Mississippi River stronghold surrendered on July 4, 1863, after holding out for more than 40 days of siege?

Vicksburg's fall, followed five days later by Port Hudson's, gave the Union the whole river and completed the second part of its Anaconda Plan. The garrison's supplies were nearly gone.

Which Shawnee chief built a Native American confederacy from Prophetstown and died fighting in the War of 1812?

Tecumseh was away recruiting allies in the South when William Henry Harrison's troops won the Battle of Tippecanoe and destroyed Prophetstown in 1811.

Which 1894 walkout over wage cuts at a railcar maker grew into a nationwide rail boycott led by Eugene Debs's union?

The Pullman Strike spread when Debs's union refused to handle any train pulling the company's cars. It shut down much of the freight and passenger traffic west of Detroit.

Which orator, three times the Democratic presidential nominee, attacked the gold standard in his "Cross of Gold" speech?

William Jennings Bryan was called the Great Commoner for his faith in the wisdom of ordinary people. His early fame as a candidate also earned him the nickname the Boy Orator.

Which $10 million agreement with Mexico added southern Arizona and southwestern New Mexico, land wanted for a railroad?

The Gadsden Purchase covers nearly 30,000 square miles south of the Gila River. Its flatter ground gave the Southern Pacific a more direct line, later known as the Sunset Route.

Which fort did Ethan Allen's Green Mountain Boys capture in May 1775, yielding cannon later hauled to Boston?

Ticonderoga's guns were dragged across Massachusetts under Henry Knox and placed on the heights above Boston Harbor, forcing the British to withdraw from the city.

Which CIA pilot was captured after a Soviet missile shot down his U-2 spy plane near Sverdlovsk in May 1960?

Gary Powers was sentenced to ten years for espionage but walked free in February 1962, traded for Soviet intelligence officer Rudolf Abel.

Which two immigrant anarchists were executed in Massachusetts in 1927 after a murder trial that drew global protests?

Sacco and Vanzetti died in the electric chair on the same day as Celestino Medeiros, a man who had confessed to the robbery killings they were convicted of.

Which conflict ended in a July 1953 armistice that created a demilitarized zone with a security area at Panmunjom?

The Korean War truce took more than two years of on-again, off-again talks, the longest negotiated armistice in history. It has been called the Forgotten War.

Which music festival drew more than 400,000 people to Max Yasgur's dairy farm in Bethel, New York, in August 1969?

Woodstock never took place in the town it is named after, which lies more than 40 miles to the northeast. It was billed as "an Aquarian Exposition: 3 Days of Peace & Music".