US Presidents
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This Presidents Day trivia quiz has 98 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 98 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Who was the first President of the United States?
George Washington
George Washington served from 1789 to 1797 and stepped down voluntarily after two terms, a precedent that held until Franklin Roosevelt ran a third time in 1940.
Q 02Which U.S. President led the country through the Civil War?
Abraham Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln was shot at Ford's Theatre five days after Lee's surrender, the first president to be assassinated; the Emancipation Proclamation came on January 1, 1863.
Q 03Who was the youngest person ever *elected* to the U.S. presidency?
John F. Kennedy
Kennedy was 43 when he won in 1960 and was also the first Catholic president; the youngest person ever to hold the office was 42, but he got there by succeeding an assassinated president rather than by winning an election.
Q 04Who was the first U.S. President to serve two non-consecutive terms?
Grover Cleveland
Cleveland served from 1885 to 1889 and again from 1893 to 1897, and he won the popular vote in all three of his presidential runs, including the 1888 election he lost.
Q 05Which US President is the only person to have also served as Chief Justice?
William Howard Taft
Taft always wanted the court more than the White House; he had turned down repeated Supreme Court appointments before becoming Chief Justice in 1921.
Q 06Who is the only U.S. President to have resigned from office?
Richard Nixon
Richard Nixon's resignation took effect at noon on August 9, 1974, and Gerald Ford pardoned him a month later.
Q 07Which U.S. President was responsible for the Louisiana Purchase?
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson, the third U.S. President, orchestrated the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, doubling the size of the United States and significantly expanding its territory.
Q 08Who was the first U.S. President to live in the White House?
John Adams
Adams moved into the still-unfinished mansion in November 1800, only months before losing his re-election bid to Thomas Jefferson.
Q 09Which U.S. President was known for his policy of "Trust Busting" and conservation efforts?
Theodore Roosevelt
Theodore Roosevelt, the 26th U.S. President, earned a reputation as a 'trust buster' for his efforts to break up monopolies and was a fervent advocate for environmental conservation, establishing numerous national parks and forests.
Q 10Which U.S. President served without being elected to either the presidency or vice presidency?
Gerald Ford
Ford was appointed vice president under the 25th Amendment after Spiro Agnew resigned in 1973, then moved up to the presidency in August 1974 when his predecessor left office.
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
The prize recognized the Carter Center's decades of election monitoring and disease eradication, and the Nobel committee openly framed it as a rebuke to the looming Iraq war.
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's advertising popularised the name 'Presidents' Day' by the mid-1980s?
Retail advertisers
Congress never renamed the holiday; the term stuck once furniture, appliance and mattress sales adopted it.
Q 23Which 1968 law moved the February presidential observance to a three-day weekend from 1971?
The Uniform Monday Holiday Act
Johnson was impeached in 1868 over his firing of the Secretary of War and survived removal in the Senate by a single vote.
Q 14Which U.S. President's portrait is featured on the twenty-dollar bill?
Andrew Jackson
Andrew Jackson, the seventh U.S. President, appears on the front of the U.S. twenty-dollar bill. He served two terms from 1829 to 1837.
Q 15Who served the shortest term as U.S. President, lasting only 31 days?
William Henry Harrison
William Henry Harrison holds the record for the shortest U.S. presidency, serving only 31 days in office before dying of pneumonia in April 1841.
Q 16Who is the only U.S. President born outside the contiguous 48 states?
Barack Obama
Obama was born in Honolulu in 1961, barely two years after Hawaii became a state.
Q 17Which U.S. President was shot by disappointed office-seeker Charles Guiteau in 1881?
James A. Garfield
Garfield lingered for 11 weeks and died of infection from his doctors' unsterilized probing of the wound rather than the bullet itself.
Q 18Who was the first U.S. President born after the Declaration of Independence?
Martin Van Buren
Born in Kinderhook, New York, in 1782, Van Buren grew up speaking Dutch at home and remains the only president whose first language was not English.
Q 19Which U.S. President oversaw the end of the Korean War with an armistice agreement?
Dwight D. Eisenhower
President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a former five-star general, fulfilled his campaign promise by securing an armistice agreement that ended the fighting in the Korean War in July 1953.
Q 20Which U.S. President signed the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964?
Lyndon B. Johnson
President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law on July 2, 1964. This comprehensive legislation aimed to end discrimination based on race, color, religion, or national origin.
The Uniform Monday Holiday Act also moved Memorial Day and Columbus Day, and briefly Veterans Day, to Mondays.
Q 24In what year did Congress first make Washington's Birthday a federal holiday in the capital?
1879
Congress made Washington's Birthday a holiday for federal workers in the District of Columbia in 1879, then extended it to all federal offices in 1885, the first federal holiday honoring an individual American.
Q 25An early draft of the 1968 holiday law would have renamed the February holiday for which two presidents jointly?
Washington and Lincoln
An early draft would have renamed the holiday Presidents' Day for Washington and Lincoln jointly; it failed in committee, leaving the federal name Washington's Birthday even though the third Monday falls between Lincoln's February 12 and Washington's February 22.
Q 26Which state does not observe the February presidential holiday at all?
Delaware
Delaware is one of the few states with no February presidential holiday. Several states rename it instead: Colorado and Ohio call it Washington–Lincoln Day, and Alabama pairs Washington with Thomas Jefferson.
Q 27Which president was in office when the stock market crashed in October 1929?
Herbert Hoover
Herbert Hoover had been president less than eight months when the market crashed on October 29, 1929; the Depression that followed cost him the 1932 election to Franklin Roosevelt.
Q 28Which decoration bearing the first president's image was revived on his 200th birthday in 1932?
The Purple Heart
The Purple Heart was re-established on February 22, 1932, Washington's 200th birthday, as a successor to the Badge of Military Merit he created in 1782, the first US decoration open to ordinary soldiers.
Q 29Who 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 30Which 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.