US Currency
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50 free US Currency trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
American money is a pocket-sized history lesson. Every bill and coin carries choices somebody argued over: whose portrait belongs on it, which symbol goes on the back, what it is made of and which words it should bear. Wars, metal shortages and counterfeiters have all left a trace on the cash in every wallet. This quiz covers paper money and coins alike. Expect questions on the people and symbols pictured on bills, the metals inside everyday change, mint marks, the State Quarters and Presidential dollar coin series, money slang, and the notes and coins issued for soldiers and wartime emergencies. It is written for curious adults, students, coin collectors and anyone running a quiz night. Each answer comes with a short explanation, so you can play straight through or print the set for a classroom or a pub round.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which US agency was founded in 1865 solely to catch counterfeiters of American paper money?
Secret Service
The Secret Service spent its first decades chasing forgers for the Treasury, and took on full-time protection of presidents only after William McKinley was assassinated in 1901.
Q 02Which president on a US bill fiercely opposed paper money and the national bank while in office?
Andrew Jackson
Andrew Jackson came to distrust banknotes after land deals on credit nearly bankrupted him, yet his portrait has fronted the $20 since 1928.
Q 03Which metal were 1943 US pennies made of so that copper could be saved for wartime ammunition?
Steel
Steel cents rusted at the edges and stuck to the magnets that vending machines used to catch slugs, so the Mint went back to a copper alloy for 1944.
Q 04Which blend of fibres, rather than wood pulp, makes up the paper used for US banknotes?
Cotton and linen
Cotton and linen, in a 75-to-25 mix, make up every Federal Reserve note, and all of that paper comes from a single firm in Dalton, Massachusetts.
Q 05In 1942, US bills were stamped with which territory's name so they could be voided if Japan invaded?
Hawaii
Hawaii was stamped across the notes after the attack on Pearl Harbor, and islanders were ordered to hand in their ordinary dollars for the marked ones.
Q 06During a Civil War coin shortage, Americans began making small change with which everyday item?
Postage stamps
Postage stamps stood in for hoarded gold and silver coins, and from August 1862 the Treasury issued tiny notes with stamp designs, worth 5 to 50 cents, to replace them.
Q 07Which Alabama-born author, the girl in The Miracle Worker, appears on the state's 2003 quarter?
Helen Keller
Helen Keller's name appears on the coin in both print and Braille, a first for American money in circulation.
Q 08Which US coin first carried FDR in 1946, a nod to his polio charity's famous fundraising drive?
Dime
The dime was the obvious choice because Roosevelt helped found the March of Dimes, and the Mint hurried the coin out for the charity's January 1946 campaign.
Q 09Which Founding Father, never a president, has appeared on the US $100 bill since 1914?
Benjamin Franklin
Benjamin Franklin lends the note its nickname, the Benjamin, and as a young printer he produced New Jersey's paper money using anti-forgery tricks of his own.
Q 10What sits inside a triangle above the unfinished pyramid on the back of the US $1 bill?
An eye
An eye, known as the Eye of Providence, looks out from the reverse of the Great Seal, which has filled the left side of the bill's back since 1935.
Q 11Which US bill in circulation has Alexander Hamilton, first Treasury Secretary, in the only portrait facing left?
$10
The $10 also carries the only person on circulating American paper money who was born outside the mainland: Hamilton came from the Caribbean.
Q 12Which Union general of the Civil War, later president, appears on the US $50 bill?
Ulysses S. Grant
Ulysses S. Grant also shaped the money itself: as president he signed the Coinage Act of 1873, which critics of its treatment of silver damned as the Crime of '73.
Q 13Which president appears on the US nickel with his Virginia home, Monticello, on the other side?
Thomas Jefferson
Q 21Since 1982 the US penny has been mostly which metal, hidden under a thin plating of copper?
Zinc
Zinc makes up 97.5% of every penny struck since late 1982, and the Mint stopped producing the coin for circulation altogether in November 2025.
Q 22Which motto first reached US paper money in 1957, a year after Congress made it the national motto?
In God We Trust
In God We Trust reached coins far earlier, on the two-cent piece of 1864, after a Pennsylvania pastor petitioned the Treasury during the Civil War.
Q 23What does 'E pluribus unum', the Latin motto on the Great Seal and US coins, mean in English?
Out of many, one
Thomas Jefferson's portrait was chosen in a 1938 contest won by Felix Schlag, a German-born sculptor who received $1,000 for the design.
Q 14Which president's half dollar was approved by Congress barely a month after his death in 1963?
John F. Kennedy
John F. Kennedy's coin was hoarded as a keepsake from the day it appeared in March 1964, so few of the early silver pieces were ever spent.
Q 15Which Shoshone woman, a guide to the Lewis and Clark expedition, is on the golden dollar of 2000?
Sacagawea
Sacagawea is shown carrying her infant son, and because no portrait of her from life exists, the sculptor worked from a model, Randy'L He-dow Teton.
Q 16Which suffragist is on the small 1979 dollar coin that Congress insisted should show a real woman?
Susan B. Anthony
Susan B. Anthony's coin flopped because it was close to a quarter in size and colour, and shoppers kept handing it over by mistake.
Q 17Which city, the national capital at the time, became home to the first US Mint in 1792?
Philadelphia
Philadelphia's Mint was the first building the federal government raised under the Constitution, and its first director, David Rittenhouse, was a scientist.
Q 18Which Kentucky Army post gives its name to the vault next door that holds much of America's gold?
Fort Knox
Fort Knox is strictly the Army base; the Mint's vault was built beside it in the 1930s to move gold away from coastal cities that were open to attack.
Q 19The 50 State Quarters came out in the order states joined the Union, so which state led off in 1999?
Delaware
Delaware was the first state to ratify the Constitution, and its quarter shows Caesar Rodney on the stormy overnight ride he made in July 1776 to break a deadlock among its delegates.
Q 20Which poet was the first Black woman on a US quarter when the American Women Quarters began in 2022?
Maya Angelou
Maya Angelou stands with arms outstretched before a bird in flight, a nod to her memoir I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.
Out of many, one was the country's unofficial motto, borrowed from the Great Seal, until Congress adopted a different official one in 1956.
Q 24Which animal on the 1913 US nickel did the sculptor say was based on a zoo resident, Black Diamond?
Bison
Bison is the proper name for the animal on the so-called Buffalo nickel, and the real Black Diamond lived in New York's Central Park Zoo until 1915.
Q 25Which crop gave its name to the Lincoln pennies of 1909 to 1958, whose backs show two ears of it?
Wheat
Wheat ears framed the words ONE CENT until 1959, when the Lincoln Memorial replaced them to mark 150 years since the president's birth.
Q 26Which Moon mission's own patch was copied for the back of the Eisenhower dollar coin of 1971?
Apollo 11
Apollo 11's patch was drawn by Michael Collins, the astronaut who stayed in lunar orbit while his two crewmates walked on the Moon.
Q 27The small letter D stamped on many modern US coins shows they were struck in which city?
Denver
Denver inherited the letter from Dahlonega, Georgia, where a gold-rush mint had used the same mark until it closed in 1861.
Q 28The W mint mark on some US collector coins stands for which Mint branch in New York State?
West Point
West Point's mint stands beside the US Military Academy, and it began in the 1930s as a vault for silver bullion before winning full branch status in 1988.
Q 29What nickname did the Union's Civil War paper money earn from the colour of ink on its reverse side?
Greenbacks
Greenbacks carried only a promise of eventual payment in coin, with no gold or silver reserve behind them, and the name later passed to American bills in general.
Q 30What name was given to the paper money Congress printed to fund the Revolutionary War?
Continentals
Continentals sank so fast that 'not worth a continental' became a byword, and the fiasco pushed the new nation toward coins of gold and silver.