US Presidents
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This Presidents Day trivia quiz has 147 free questions with answers and covers the holiday itself and the people it honours. You will meet the third-Monday rule and the 1968 law that created it, the reason Washington's birthday moved from February 11 to February 22, the cherry-pie tradition, the Senate's annual reading of the Farewell Address, and the Daytona 500 and NBA All-Star weekend that now share the date. From there it widens to the presidents themselves: who was first into the White House, who is on the penny, the dime and the quarter, who carved Mount Rushmore and who is on it, and the odd facts about Tyler, Polk, Taylor, Coolidge, Hoover, Grant, Reagan, Carter and Obama that win pub quizzes. Easy questions suit a classroom or a family game; the hard ones will stretch history buffs. Every answer has been checked against a primary or encyclopaedic source and each question shows its citation once you have answered, so you can trust what you learn here.
30 of 147 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which Union general accepted Robert E. Lee's surrender in 1865 and won the presidency three years later?
Ulysses S. Grant
Ulysses S. Grant offered generous terms at Appomattox: Lee's soldiers could go home on parole, and those who owned horses could keep them.
Q 02Which U.S. President led the country through the Civil War?
Abraham Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln's election in November 1860 prompted seven slave states to leave the Union before he had even taken office.
Q 03Who was the youngest person ever elected to the U.S. presidency?
John F. Kennedy
John F. Kennedy was 43 when he won in 1960; Theodore Roosevelt took office younger, at 42, but only by succeeding an assassinated president, not by winning an election.
Q 04Who was the first U.S. President to serve two non-consecutive terms?
Grover Cleveland
Grover Cleveland won the popular vote in 1888 but lost the Electoral College to Benjamin Harrison, then came back to beat Harrison in their 1892 rematch.
Q 05Which US President is the only person to have also served as Chief Justice?
William Howard Taft
William Howard Taft's lifelong ambition was the court, not the White House: he twice turned down a Supreme Court seat to finish his work in the Philippines, then became Chief Justice in 1921.
Q 06Who is the only U.S. President to have resigned from office?
Richard Nixon
Richard Nixon quit in August 1974 after the 'smoking gun' tape showed he had tried to use the CIA to block the FBI's Watergate investigation.
Q 07Which U.S. President was responsible for the Louisiana Purchase?
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson's envoys went to Paris hoping to buy New Orleans; Napoleon offered the whole territory instead, and the deal nearly doubled the size of the country.
Q 08Who was the first U.S. President to live in the White House?
John Adams
John Adams moved into the damp, unfinished house on November 1, 1800, just before the election he lost to Thomas Jefferson, and lived there only four months.
Q 09Which U.S. President was known for his policy of "Trust Busting" and conservation efforts?
Theodore Roosevelt
Theodore Roosevelt's Justice Department sued J. P. Morgan's Northern Securities railroad trust in 1902 and won at the Supreme Court; he also protected about 230 million acres of public land.
Q 10Which U.S. President served without being elected to either the presidency or vice presidency?
Gerald Ford
Gerald Ford was appointed vice president under the 25th Amendment after Spiro Agnew resigned in 1973, then moved up to the presidency in August 1974.
Q 11The New Deal, a series of programs and reforms, was enacted under which U.S. President?
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Franklin D. Roosevelt pushed the New Deal's first wave through in his first 100 days, a yardstick every president since has been measured against.
Q 12Which former U.S. President won the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize for his post-presidency human rights work?
Jimmy Carter
Jimmy Carter founded the Carter Center in 1982; it has monitored elections around the world and cut Guinea worm disease from 3.5 million cases a year by more than 99 percent.
Q 13Who was the first U.S. President to be impeached by the House of Representatives?
Andrew Johnson
Q 21On which day of the year is Presidents' Day observed in the United States?
The third Monday of February
The third Monday of February floats between the 15th and 21st, so Presidents' Day never actually lands on Washington's birthday, February 22.
Q 22Which group did most to popularise the name 'Presidents' Day' by the mid-1980s?
Retail advertisers
Retail advertisers seized on the name for their February sales, yet Congress never adopted it: in federal law the holiday is still Washington's Birthday.
Q 23Which 1968 law moved the February presidential observance to a three-day weekend from 1971?
Andrew Johnson was impeached in 1868 for trying to replace Secretary of War Edwin Stanton in defiance of the Tenure of Office Act, and the Senate fell one vote short of removing him.
Q 14Which U.S. President's portrait is featured on the twenty-dollar bill?
Andrew Jackson
Andrew Jackson waged war on the national bank and opposed paper money, so his place on the twenty since 1928 is often called ironic.
Q 15Who served the shortest term as U.S. President, lasting only 31 days?
William Henry Harrison
William Henry Harrison gave the longest inaugural address on record, without an overcoat on a cold March day, and died a month later; his doctors blamed pneumonia.
Q 16In which state was Barack Obama born?
Hawaii
Hawaii had been a state for less than two years when Obama was born in Honolulu in 1961; after four boyhood years in Indonesia he returned to live with his grandparents.
Q 17Which U.S. President was shot by disappointed office-seeker Charles Guiteau in 1881?
James A. Garfield
James A. Garfield lived for 11 weeks after the shooting and died of blood poisoning; his doctors had repeatedly probed the wound with unsterilized fingers and instruments.
Q 18Who was the first U.S. President born after the Declaration of Independence?
Martin Van Buren
Martin Van Buren, born in 1782, was the first president born in the new nation; raised in Dutch-speaking Kinderhook, New York, he spoke English as a second language.
Q 19Which U.S. President oversaw the end of the Korean War with an armistice agreement?
Dwight D. Eisenhower
Dwight D. Eisenhower promised during the 1952 campaign to go to Korea, made the trip as president-elect, and the armistice followed in July 1953.
Q 20Which U.S. President signed the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964?
Lyndon B. Johnson
Lyndon B. Johnson told Congress that passing the bill would be the best memorial to the slain John F. Kennedy, who had proposed it, and signed it after the Senate broke a long filibuster.
The Uniform Monday Holiday Act
The Uniform Monday Holiday Act moved Veterans Day to an October Monday too, a change Congress reversed in 1975, restoring November 11 from 1978.
Q 24Which of George Washington's writings is read aloud in the Senate every year to mark his birthday?
His Farewell Address
His Farewell Address has been read aloud in the Senate every year since 1896, with the two parties taking turns to supply the reader, although it warns against the spirit of party.
Q 25What name did Lyndon B. Johnson give his domestic programs, which created Medicare and Head Start?
The Great Society
The Great Society was launched in a 1964 speech at the University of Michigan, but by 1968 the Vietnam War had drained the money and attention it needed.
Q 26Which president was in office when the stock market crashed in October 1929?
Herbert Hoover
Herbert Hoover had been president for under eight months when the market crashed; as the Depression deepened, the shacks of the homeless were nicknamed Hoovervilles.
Q 27Which decoration bearing George Washington's profile was revived on his 200th birthday in 1932?
The Purple Heart
The Purple Heart revived Washington's 1782 Badge of Military Merit, which only three soldiers are known to have received before it lapsed for 150 years.
Q 28Who was the first president to be impeached twice by the House of Representatives?
Donald Trump
Donald Trump was impeached in December 2019 over the Ukraine phone call and again in January 2021 over the Capitol riot; the Senate acquitted him both times.
Q 29Which president took the United States into the Spanish–American War in 1898?
William McKinley
William McKinley asked Congress for war in April 1898 after the battleship Maine exploded in Havana harbor; the brief war brought Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines under US control.
Q 30Which home of Thomas Jefferson appears on the back of the US nickel?
Monticello
Monticello was Jefferson's own design, but he died so deeply in debt that his daughter had to sell the house.