Ordering American Presidents Trivia Quiz

George Washington (1732 - 1799) was the first President of the United States under the Constitution, and the one that most people associate with that phrase. He was elected in 1788, and served from 1789 until 1792. His decision not to seek a third term was considered to set the precedent for future presidents, until Franklin D. Roosevelt broke with tradition and was elected four times. Following that, a Constitutional amendment was passed limiting the presidential tenure.

Washington's first military experience was fighting for the British during the French and Indian War. His successful leadership there led to his later appointment by the Continental Congress as Commander of the Continental Army which led the fight for independence from Great Britain. He served in that post from 1775 until 1783, resigning after the signing of the Treaty of Paris. He then became the first of many war heroes to be elected to the presidency.

James Monroe (1758 - 1831) served as President from 1817 until 1825, the last one to be one of the Founding Fathers (those involved as leaders in the path to independence). He had been involved in the negotiations that led to the Louisiana Purchase by Thomas Jefferson, and served as James Madison's Secretary of State (and also Secretary of War during the War of 1812).

Madison is perhaps best known for the Monroe Doctrine, a policy he first outlined in his 1823 State of the Union Address. He took the position that any interference by a European nation in the political affairs of the nations in South and Central America which were establishing themselves as independent nations was not to be tolerated. Most significantly, no new colonies were to be established. This doctrine has been used as the justification for United States interference in disputes between or within nations, because they consider themselves to be the only ones who can and should do so.

John Tyler Jr. (1790 - 1862) was never actually elected President. Rather, he was elected as Vice President to William Henry Harrison in 1840, with a campaign slogan "Tippecanoe and Tyler Too" calling on Harrison's victory against Native Americans at the 1811 Battle of Tippecanoe. The slogan was made into a popular song that is considered to have contributed to their electoral success. When Harrison died one month after taking office, Tyler became the first Vice President to succeed to the Presidency.

The death of William Harrison was the first presidential death to become associated with the Curse of Tecumseh (the leader of the Native American confederation involved in the Battle of Tippecanoe), ostensibly dooming any president elected in a year that was a multiple of 20 to die in office. It held true for quite a while: 1860 - Lincoln, assassinated in office; 1880 - Garfield, assassinated in office; 1900 - McKinley, assassinated in office; 1920 - Harding died in office; 1940 - Roosevelt dies in office; 1960 - Kennedy assassinated in office. In 1980 Ronald Reagan broke the curse, although he had to survive an assassination attempt to do so.

Franklin Pierce (1804 - 1869), born in New Hampshire, was elected in 1852 as a compromise candidate, one who opposed abolition because he feared it would destroy the union, but whose northern roots gained support there. His is generally now seen as an unsuccessful presidency, as the tensions between northern and southern interests increased dramatically while he was in office. His tenure was not helped by the fact that he was a reluctant candidate, whose wife did not want to leave New Hampshire, and whose son was killed in a train accident a few weeks after his election.

Pierce signed into effect the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which effectively repealed the Missouri Compromise, and left it up to individual states to determine whether or not slavery would be allowed, rather than having the federal government take part in the process. While the bill had been intended to facilitate the building of a transcontinental railroad, it led to lengthy battles in the new territories as opposing sides fought to establish the state's position on slavery.

James Abram Garfield (1831 - 1881) was president from March of 1881 until his death in September of that year, following his shooting by Charles Guiteau in July. Guiteau was apparently outraged that his contributions to Garfield's elections had not been properly recognised by appointment to a government post. It has been postulated that the shot was only a partial cause of Garfield's death; the poor medical hygiene of the times led to infection, and the efforts to remove the bullet may have cause internal organ damage. As part of the process of locating the bullet, Alexander Graham Bell developed a metal detector, but it was not successful because the head doctors insisted that the bullet was in a region where it was not in fact located, so only that area was tested.

Because his tenure was so brief, his political accomplishments as president were not impressive, but he did institute civil service reforms to reduce or eliminate corruption, and pushed on several fronts for African-American rights.

Theodore Roosevelt Jr. (1858 - 1919), often called Teddy, was elected vice president under William McKinley in 1900, a position he held from March until September of 1901, when he became president following McKinley's assassination by the anarchist Leon Czolgosz. Formerly known for leading an army group known as the Rough Riders during the Spanish American War, he was elected governor of New York in 1898. His selection for the vice-presidency was seen by many as a way of getting him out of New York state politics, where his Progressive policies sat uncomfortably with the leaders of his party.

Teddy Roosevelt's administration was marked by strong anti-trust action, and a high value placed on conservation, including the establishment of the first national park, Yellowstone. He also started work on the Panama Canal, and won the 1906 Nobel Peace Prize for organising a resolution to the Russo-Japanese War. In 1908 he supported Howard Taft for the presidency, but became unhappy with his friend's changing politics, and ran for a third term in 1912. Taft won the Republican nomination, so Roosevelt set up his own party, the Bull Moose Party, and between them they divided the vote so neatly that the Democrat, Woodrow Wilson, won.

John Calvin Coolidge Jr. (1872 - 1933) was yet another president who fell into the job on the death of his predecessor, taking on the role when Warren Harding died in August of 1923. Coolidge was elected in his own right in 1924, and served that full term. He is generally considered by historians to have been a fairly unsuccessful president, despite his stalwart efforts in the area of civil rights, because of his disastrous fiscal policies, which some see as contributing to the Great Depression which was to follow during the tenure of his successor, Herbert Hoover.

Coolidge has been nicknamed 'Silent Cal', because his unease in social situations was palpable, and his position required a lot of public appearances, during which he tended to retreat to a corner when possible, or concentrate on the food rather than the dinner table conversation. The story of him telling a woman who had bet she could get more than two words out of him, "You lose" is apocryphal, but his biographer Robert Sobel recorded that he wrote, "The words of a President have an enormous weigh and ought not to be used indiscriminately."

Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882 - 1945), commonly known as FDR, served as president from March of 1933 until his death in April of 1945. He is the only person to have been elected to the office more than twice, and a constitutional amendment passed after his death ensures that no others will do so. He served three full terms, and part of a fourth - clearly a popular president following his success in leading the country through the Great Depression and World War II, which ended a few months after his death.

American presidents are often evaluated on their accomplishments during their first 100 days in office, as they hit the ground running and start fulfilling the promises they had made during their election campaign. FDR has an amazing 100 days, starting a large number of the programs (later to be called the New Deal) to alleviate the consequences of the Great Depression, some by legislation, more by executive order.

Dwight David Eisenhower (1890 - 1969) was nicknamed Ike, a shortening of their surname shared by his siblings, and during his campaign for the presidency used the succinct slogan "I Like Ike". His popularity in the 1952 election stemmed largely from his high-profile success in World War II, when he achieved the rank of five-star general, and (as Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe) was in charge of Operation Overlord, the invasion of Normandy on 6 June 1944, a date often called D-Day. Before that, he had overseen the campaign in North Africa in 1942-3.

Eisenhower had no political experience before being nominated as the Republican candidate for the presidency in the 1952 election. In fact, the Democrats had also been trying to convince him to run as their candidate, and both parties had wooed him in 1948. The selection of Richard Nixon as his running mate was intended to both mollify the right wing of the Republican party and add youth to the ticket. His presidency was noted as a time when American politicians maintained a strong anti-Communist stance - this was the time of McCarthyism and the start of involvement in Vietnam.

Barack Hussein Obama II (1961 - ) was elected as a Democratic president in 2008, the first African-American to fill that position, which he did for two terms. He was also the first president to be born outside the land area of the 48 contiguous American states, since he was born in Honolulu. His father returned to Kenya when he was three, and his mother remarried a Chinese-Indonesian man, so he spent about five years living in Indonesia, before returning to live with his maternal grandparents in Honolulu. Quite a cosmopolitan upbringing!

Obama's career in law (in a firm that specialised in civil rights matters) was followed by a stint as an Illinois State Senator, before election in 2004 to be Senator from Illinois. He only served four years of the six-year term before becoming president. This meteoric political rise was due in large part to his excellent oratorical skills. He was awarded the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize "for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples", the fourth president to receive this award, following Teddy Roosevelt in 1906, Woodrow Wilson in 1919 and Jimmy Carter (post officio) in 2002.