American Firsts Trivia Quiz

Answer: Delaware

Ratification is a legal process that a document has to undergo in order for it to become legal. This means that it is approved by elected representatives of either states or the country as a whole. The United States Constitution was required to be ratified by at least nine of the original thirteen states in order for it to become legal. On December 7, 1787, the Delaware General Assembly, the representative body of Delaware, unanimously approved the new constitution by 30 votes to 0, which made it the first of the old thirteen colonies to ratify the document.

As a result of it being the first, Delaware's nickname is "The First State".

Answer: John Adams

In December 1788, the first presidential election took place in the United States under the terms of the new constitution. This established the method of electing both the president and vice-president, which initially saw a single list of candidates; the candidate with the most votes was to become president, with the candidate in second named as vice-president. George Washington was unanimously chosen as President of the United States, with John Adams, the former Ambassador to Great Britain, coming in second. Adams, who was the sixth person to sign the Declaration of Independence, served two terms as vice-president under President Washington, before being elected president following the 1796 election.

Answer: Philadelphia

On July 4, 1776, the Second Continental Congress, the representative body of the thirteen colonies, while meeting in Philadelphia, issued the Declaration of Independence that saw the colonies break from Great Britain, making the city the first capital city of the new country.

Although the subsequent Revolutionary War saw the Congress move several times, it returned to Philadelphia each time. The Constitution ratified in 1788 specified that a new national capital was to be established. In 1790, Congress passed the Residence Act, establishing that the planned capital would be located on the banks of the Potomac River but, in the period before it was complete, named Philadelphia as the official capital of the United States. Philadelphia remained the national capital between 1790 and 1800.

Answer: One month

William Henry Harrison had run for President in 1836, losing to Martin van Buren. In 1839, he was selected by the Whig Party as their candidate again, this time for the election in 1840, which Harrison this time won, becoming, at the age of 67, the oldest man elected to the presidency up to that point. Harrison took the oath of office on March 4, 1841 in Washington DC.

The day was cold and wet, but the new president chose not to wear either an overcoat or a hat, and rode himself to the ceremony on horseback rather than take a closed carriage.

He also delivered the longest ever inaugural address, lasting two hours. Three weeks after his inauguration, on March 26, Harrison became ill with cold-like symptoms. The following day he suffered chills while meeting his cabinet, and the day after came down with a fever.

At the time, medicine was still extremely primitive, and the treatments prescribed by the president's doctors only weakened him. On April 4, exactly one month after his inauguration, Harrison died, becoming the first president to die in office.

Answer: South Carolina

In November 1860, Abraham Lincoln was elected President of the United States, the first Republican to hold the office. Lincoln ran on a platform opposing the extension of slavery to the new territories being established in the west of the country. Although Lincoln was not even on the ballot in ten states where slavery was still legal, he won both the national popular vote and the electoral college.

His victory immediately led seven slave states to begin processes to leave the United States, an act called secession. On December 20, 1860, a group of politicians in South Carolina met and issued a document called the Ordinance of Secession, which publicly stated that the state would immediately withdraw from the United States.

This was followed by another document called the Declaration of Secession, issued on December 24, which laid out the reasons for South Carolina's decision. Following South Carolina, between January 1 and February 1, 1861 another six states - Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and Texas - similarly seceded, which then established a new nation, the Confederate States of America, on February 8.

Answer: Benjamin Harrison

Grover Cleveland was first elected president in 1884, having previously served as the Governor of New York. But, in the following election of 1888, having attempted to reduce tariffs, which are charges on foreign goods imported, he was defeated by Benjamin Harrison, who promised to maintain tariffs as a way of ensuring American industries. Following his defeat by Harrison, Cleveland returned to private life, and went to live with his family in New York.

However, his good reputation while he had been president led to him being nominated by his party, the Democrats, to run for president again in 1892. Again, tariffs were a major issue, this time because they had caused the price of goods to become very high, leading to calls for their reform. Cleveland's position on the issue of tariffs and their reform saw him regain the presidency, four years after he had lost it. Cleveland chose not to run for a third term in 1896, instead choosing to retire to his house in New Jersey.

Answer: Panama

During the 19th century, foreign travel by sitting presidents was a taboo, as the public did not want their elected leader to be mingling with royalty or visiting grand palaces. As a result, no sitting president made an overseas trip until 1906. However, in the years leading up to that, the idea of the President leaving the country to undertake diplomatic business was re-evaluated as the United States began to have greater influence as a world power.

In 1903, the United States and Panama agreed a treaty to complete the Panama Canal, a waterway across Panama that would connect the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.

In November 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt departed on a 17-day visit to Panama, including to see the construction works. Roosevelt was an enthusiastic backer of the project, and had insisted that better conditions for the workforce be instituted.

His visit was a major boost to the morale of the workers at the time.

Answer: Oklahoma

The State of Oklahoma is in the south central United States, occupying an area to the north of Texas. The state was originally created as a territory in 1834 when the US Government created a dedicated area, which became the Indian Territory, for Native Americans consisting of all federally owned land west of the Mississippi River that was not part of the states of Missouri or Louisiana, or the Arkansas Territory.

In 1890, a second territory was created that was called the Oklahoma Territory, which came about through the settlement of the area to the west of the Indian Territory.

In 1902, five Native American nations began planning for the admission of the Indian Territory as a state, organizing a convention to draft a constitution, and lobbying for admission in Washington DC. Politicians representing eastern states feared the admission of multiple new states from the west, and so pressured President Theodore Roosevelt to instead admit the Oklahoma and Indian Territories as a single state.

The Oklahoma Enabling Act was passed in 1906 that joined the two territories together, with President Roosevelt announcing the admission of Oklahoma as a state in November 1907, the first new state admitted in the twentieth century.

Answer: Four

Franklin D. Roosevelt was serving as the Governor of New York when he first ran for president in 1932. As the challenger, he defeated President Herbert Hoover in a landslide, taking office at his inauguration on March 4, 1933, the last occasion the inauguration was held on this date. Roosevelt subsequently ran again in 1936, 1940 and 1944, each time winning by further landslides.

Although there was no law setting limits on the number of times a person could run for president, George Washington had set an unofficial tradition that a president would only seek two terms.

Some during the history of the office had sought a third term, but Roosevelt was the first to succeed, which began a debate about the official setting of term-limits for the presidency, to stop anyone from being elected an unlimited number of times.

As a result, the Twenty-Second Amendment to the Constitution was ratified in 1951, that limited any individual to a maximum of two terms as president. The first person affected by the limits set out in the Twenty-Second Amendment was President Dwight D. Eisenhower.

His predecessor, Harry S. Truman, who was Roosevelt's vice-president and succeeded him upon his death in April 1945, was exempted from its conditions by Section 1 of the amendment, which stated that the president in office when the amendment was first proposed was exempt.

Answer: False

In September 1901, President William McKinley was six months into his second term in office when he visited the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York. At the time, McKinley was popular, having led the United States out of an economic depression and to victory in the Spanish-American War of 1898. On Friday September 6, McKinley arrived at Buffalo's Temple of Music for a reception when he was shot by Leon Czolgosz, the son of Polish immigrants, who had, during the late 1890s, developed into an anarchist.

Although McKinley suffered serious wounds to his abdomen, he was quickly operated on, and in the following days seemed to be recovering. However, it soon became apparent that an infection had taken hold, and McKinley's condition then worsened.

The president eventually died eight days after he was shot, on September 14, 1901, becoming the third president to have died at the hands of an assassin, and the first in the twentieth century. Leon Czolgosz was put on trial for McKinley's assassination on September 23, after which he was found guilty, and executed by electric chair on October 29.

Answer: Twenty-fifth

Under the terms of the United States Constitution as it was originally written, the only mention made of the vice-president succeeding to the presidency in the event of the death or resignation of the president was in Article 2, Section 1. However, this did not make clear whether the vice-president merely assumed the duties of the presidency, or actually became president.

In addition, no mention was made of filling the position of vice-president, should the holder become president. As a result, the only way for someone to take the office of vice-president was at the next scheduled election. So, in 1963, a proposal was made for a new constitutional amendment that would lay down explicitly that the vice-president would in fact become the president if the sitting president died or resigned (or was unable to fulfil their duties), and that a new vice-president could be appointed subject to their nomination being confirmed by both chambers of the United States Congress.

The new amendment, which became the Twenty-Fifth, was ratified in February 1967. Six years later, President Nixon used the terms of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment to appoint Gerald Ford as his new vice-president following the resignation of Vice-President Spiro Agnew.

Answer: Watergate scandal

In 1972, during that year's presidential campaign, a burglary took place at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee, which was located in the Watergate office complex in Washington DC. Upon the arrest of the burglars, the investigation found out that they had in fact been hired to do the break-in, and that the money they were paid had come from President Nixon's re-election campaign. Further investigations led to the discovery that Nixon had known about the burglary beforehand, and had attempted to cover up his involvement and the involvement of his administration.

The revelation of the President's involvement led to the House of Representatives preparing Articles of Impeachment against him, with plans for a trial in the United States Senate that would have seen him removed from office. To prevent this from happening, on August 9, 1974, Nixon chose to resign from office, with Vice-President Gerald Ford taking over as president.

The infamy of the scandal saw the suffix "-gate" enter the language as an indicator of a major scandal.

Answer: Democrat

Geraldine Ferraro grew up in New York City and, having worked as a lawyer in her husband's firm for 13 years, took a position in the Queen's County District Attorney's Office as a prosecutor in 1974 by her cousin, the then District Attorney Nicholas Ferraro.

In 1978, she was elected to the United States House of Representatives for New York's 9th Congressional District as a Democrat. Despite her inexperience, she quickly rose to prominence, with a number of influential committee appointments, as well as being elected Secretary of the House Democratic Caucus, one of the party's leadership positions.

In 1984, in the run up to former vice-president Walter Mondale being named as the Democratic nominee for president, moves were made to have a woman named as his running mate and the nominee for vice-president. Mondale compiled a five-person shortlist, which included Ferraro, and named her as his running mate in July 1984.

As the vice-presidential candidate, Ferraro became the first woman ever to be named on a major party's presidential ticket. Subsequent to Ferraro, Sarah Palin was the Republican nominee for vice-president in 2008, while Hillary Clinton was the Democratic nominee for president in 2016.

In 2020, Democrat Kamala Harris became the first woman to be elected vice-president when she ran alongside Joe Biden.

Answer: California

Although Nancy Pelosi was born in Baltimore, where her father served both as a United States Congressman and the city's mayor, her political career began following her marriage in 1969, following which she and her husband moved to San Francisco. Following their move to California, Pelosi became friends with Phillip Burton, the local US Congressman, and began to rise up the ranks of the state's Democratic Party. Burton died in 1983, and was replaced by his wife, Sala.

In 1986, she was diagnosed with cancer, just after she was re-elected, and decided not to run again, naming Pelosi as her designated successor. Sala Burton died in February 1987 and, in the special election to fill the seat, Nancy Pelosi was elected. Having held a number of major committee assignments during her tenure, in 2001 Pelosi was elected as the House Minority Whip, serving as the number two to the Democrats leader, Dick Gephardt, in the House of Representatives.

The following year, Gephardt stepped down and Pelosi became the House Minority Leader, the first woman to lead a major party in the House. Following the 2006 midterm elections, the Democrats gained control of the House of Representatives, and Pelosi, as the party's leader, was elected as Speaker, the most senior position in the House, to become not just the first woman to hold the position, but the first Italian-American and the first representing a district in California.

Answer: Illinois

Barack Obama was born in Honolulu in Hawaii. Aside the first year of his life, when his mother attended the University of Washington, and the period between the ages of six and ten, when he lived in Indonesia with his mother and stepfather, he lived in Hawaii until he graduated from high school in 1979. Obama enrolled at Occidental College in Los Angeles in 1979, before transferring to Columbia University in New York in 1981, from where he graduated in 1983.

In 1985, he moved to Chicago, where he worked as a community organizer for three years before enrolling in law school at Harvard in 1988. Upon his graduation in 1991, he returned to Chicago, where he worked as a civil rights lawyer, as well as teaching constitutional law at the University of Chicago.

In 1996, he was elected to the Illinois Senate, gaining re-election twice, in 1998 and 2002. During this period, he unsuccessfully ran for election to the United States House of Representatives in 2000, before running a successful campaign for one of Illinois' US Senate seats in 2004.

In his election to the Senate, Obama won 70% of the popular vote, and took 92 of the state's 102 counties, the largest winning margin of anyone elected to the Senate from Illinois to that point. Obama served two-thirds of his six-year term before he was elected president in 2008.