Celebrities Born in the Great State of Maryland Quiz

Answer:

FYI - All incorrect answers are people born in Montana.

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- Frank Zappa (Baltimore) was an American musician, composer, and bandleader. In a career spanning more than 30 years, he produced almost all of the 60-plus albums he released with his band the Mothers of Invention and as a solo artist. He was inducted into the International Mustache Hall of Fame in 2015 (inaugural class) in Music & Arts.

- Harriet Tubman (Dorchester County) was an American abolitionist and social activist. She was a valuable military asset for the Union Army during the American Civil War. She went behind enemy lines to lay the foundations for a plantation raid along the Combahee River. It is estimated that roughly 700 enslaved people were freed in South Carolina as a result of this attack.

- John Wilkes Booth (Bel Air) was an American stage actor who assassinated United States President Abraham Lincoln at Ford's Theater in Washington, D.C., on April 14, 1865. In March of 1865, a fellow actor and colleague of Booth's named Charles Warwick rented a room in the Petersen House - the home across the street from Ford's Theater, where Lincoln would ultimately be taken on the night of his death. While visiting Warwick in March, Booth took a nap on the bed where Lincoln would expire a month later on April 15th, 1865.

- Francis Scott Key (Frederick County) was an American lawyer, author, and poet from Frederick, Maryland, best known as the author of the text of the American national anthem, "The Star-Spangled Banner". He gained national fame as a hotshot lawyer in 1807, defending two alleged treasonous comrades of Aaron Burr, before later becoming the District Attorney for the District of Columbia from 1833 to 1841.

- Thurgood Marshall (Baltimore) was an American civil rights lawyer and jurist who served as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1967 until 1991. One of his most influential and renowned achievements came in 1954 with the case of Brown v. Board of Education. The Court's unanimous decision, delivered on May 17, 1954, declared that segregated schools were inherently unequal and violated the Constitution.

- Babe Ruth (Baltimore) was an American professional baseball player whose career in Major League Baseball spanned 22 seasons, from 1914 through 1935. He is the only player since the turn of the 20th century to lead his league in Triple Crown categories as both a hitter and a pitcher, and he did it in three years. He broke the single-season home run record in three consecutive seasons, with 29 in 1919, 54 in 1920, and 59 in 1921.

- Spiro T Agnew (Baltimore) was the 39th vice president of the United States, serving from 1969 until his resignation in 1973. He was the second vice president to resign, the other being John C. Calhoun in 1832. He was forced to resign on Oct. 10, 1973, after a US Justice Department investigation uncovered evidence of corruption during his years in Maryland politics.

- Leon Uris (Baltimore) was an American author of historical fiction who wrote the books "Exodus" (1958) and "Trinity" (1976). At age six, Uris reportedly wrote an operetta inspired by the death of his dog. He attended schools in Norfolk, Virginia, and Baltimore, but never graduated from high school, and failed English three times. When he was 17 and in his senior year of high school, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, and he enlisted in the United States Marine Corps.

- Upton Sinclair (Baltimore) was an American author, muckraker, political activist, and the 1934 Democratic Party nominee for governor of California. Out of his own pocket, he sent copies of his novel "The Jungle" to every member of the U.S. Congress and then-President Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt read Sinclair's novel and was horrified by the descriptions of conditions in the meat packing industry. He was inspired to champion the Pure Food and Drug Act and establish the Food and Drug Administration.

- Francis X Bushman (Baltimore) was an American film actor and director. From 1914 to 1917 Bushman was America's most popular leading man, but his 1918 divorce revealed to his bevy of female fans that he was not the eligible bachelor they thought, but a married man with five children.

- HL Mencken (Baltimore) was an American journalist, essayist, satirist, cultural critic, and scholar of American English. In early 1898 he took a writing class at the Cosmopolitan University, a free correspondence school. This was to be the entirety of Mencken's formal education in journalism, or in any other subject.

- Eubie Blake (Baltimore) was an American pianist and composer of ragtime, jazz, and popular music. Blake said he composed the melody for "Charleston Rag" in 1899 when he would have been only 12 years old. He did not commit it to paper until 1915 when he learned musical notation. He had seven siblings who all died in infancy. He was the only surviving child. His parents had both been slaves.

- Philip Glass (Baltimore) is an American composer and pianist. He has written fifteen operas, numerous chamber operas, and musical theatre works, fourteen symphonies, twelve concertos, nine string quartets, and various other chamber music, along with many film scores.

- Frederick Douglass (Cordova) was an American social reformer, abolitionist, orator, writer, and statesman. He was the most photographed American of the 19th century, sitting for more portraits than even Abraham Lincoln. Douglass intentionally sought out the cameras, believing that photography was an important tool for achieving civil rights because it offered a way to portray African Americans fairly and accurately.

- Nancy Pelosi (Baltimore) is an American politician who served as the 52nd speaker of the United States House of Representatives from 2007 to 2011 and again from 2019 to 2023. She was the first woman elected as U.S. House Speaker and the first woman to lead a major political party in either chamber of Congress.