An American Miscellany Trivia Quiz

Answer: It was burnt down

A competition for the plans for the original White House was held in 1791 (although it was not officially called the White House until 1902) The cornerstone was laid on Oct. 13, 1792, and President John Adams and his wife, Abigail, became the first occupants in 1800. The building was, however, burnt down by the British during an invasion in 1814 and was not rebuilt until 1817.

Answer: 668

The Death Penalty has led to 668 executions across the United States since 1976. Of those 98 were carried out in 1999 and as of June 23, 50 have taken place this year.

Answer: An Italian sailor

The Italian sailor (or more precisely navigator) was Amerigo Vespucci, who, after making a voyage to South America in 1501-1502, became convinced that the discovered land was not a part of Asia, but a newly discovered land.

Answer: My Lai Massacre

On March 16, 1968, the men of Charlie Company, 11th Brigade, Americal Division, under Lt. William Calley entered the village of My Lai deep in Viet Cong and massacred over 300 apparently unarmed civilians including women, children and the elderly. According to eyewitness reports offered after the event, several old men were bayoneted, praying women and children were shot in the back of the head, and at least one girl was raped, and then killed.

The American public, however, did not hear of the massacre until November 1969, two months after Calley was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment.

Answer: March 20, 1946

Although Japan surrendered on August 14, 1945, Japanese-Americans continued to be held within the internment camps that they had been sent to until March 20, 1946, when the remaining internment camp at Tule Lake was closed. Beginning in late 1941, virtually all persons of Japanese heritage were rounded up in the United States and sent to 'assembly centers' and then on to 'relocation centers', where they spent the rest of the war.

Despite being interred, being forced to live in appalling conditions and losing all of their land, a number of Japanese-American men volunteered to join the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, a segregated all-Japanese-American combat unit, which fought during the Second World War.

A largely inefficient attempt to compensate the Japanese-Americans was made in July, 1948 through the Japanese American Evacuation Claims Act, but realistic compensation and apologies were not extended until August, 1988, when Reagan signed HR442 into law.

This was over seven years after the CWRIC held a public hearing in Washington D.C. as part of its investigation into the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.

Answer: 70,000

On Aug. 6, 1945, Hiroshima became the first city in the world to be struck by an atomic bomb, which was dropped by a B-29 bomber of the U.S. Air Forces. Most of the city was destroyed, and estimates of the number killed outright or shortly after the blast have ranged upward from 70,000. Deaths from radiation injury have mounted through the years.

Answer: Canada

The War of 1812 between the United States of America and Great Britain (with its associated territory in Upper and Lower Canada) was actually the beginning of a war that continued until 1814, when a peace treaty was signed in Ghent. The seeds of the war lie in the seizure of American ships during the Napoleonic Wars, as well as the impressment of numerous American sailors into the British Navy and the feeling by Western American land-hungry frontiersmen that their troubles with the Indians were the result of British intrigue.

The primary undertaking of the war would be the conquest of Canada, but by the end of 1812 the Americans had been repulsed, mostly due to the actions of Canadian militia and Native forces.

Answer: James Madison

Although a slaveholder all his life, he was active during his later years in the American Colonization Society, whose mission was the resettlement of slaves in Africa. Washington and Wythe also kept slaves, despite lifelong aversions to slavery and only released their slaves by will after their deaths.

Answer: The Underground Railroad

Escaped slaves from the South were secretly helped by sympathetic Northerners, in defiance of the Fugitive Slave Acts, to reach places of safety in the North or in Canada. it was named The Underground Railroad because its activities had to be carried out in secret, using darkness or disguise, and because railway terms were used in reference to the conduct of the system. Various routes were lines, stopping places were called stations, those who aided along the way were conductors, and their charges were known as packages or freight. Estimates of the number of black people who reached freedom vary greatly, from 40,000 to 100,000.

The name of Harriet Tubman, who played a key part in this, is closely associated with the Underground Railroad.

Answer: Battle of Wounded Knee

More than 200 Sioux men, women, and children were massacred by U.S. troops in what has been called the Battle of Wounded Knee, an episode that concluded the conquest of the North American Indian. A few hundred Sioux left their reservation at Pine Ridge, seeking to hide in the Badlands. Technically classified as hostiles because they had left the reservation, the Indians gathered around Chief Big Foot (who was dying of pneumonia) but surrendered quietly to pursuing troops of the 7th Cavalry on the night of December 28. Following an overnight encampment near Wounded Knee Creek, the Indians were surrounded and were nearly disarmed when a scuffle broke out over a young brave's new rifle.

A shot was fired from within the group of struggling men, and a trooper fell. From close range the soldiers, supported by machine guns, fired into the Indians, whose only arms were the clubs and knives that they had hidden in blankets. Fleeing Indians were pursued, and some were killed miles from the camp. Although the number of Indian dead is unknown (the Indians removed some of the dead later), 144 Indians, including 44 women and 16 children, were buried in a mass grave the following spring when the weather permitted the army to return. About 30 soldiers were killed during the hostilities.

Answer: Heat Sickness

Zachary Taylor spent July 4, 1850, eating cherries and milk at a ceremony at the Washington Monument. He got sick from the heat and died five days later, the second president to die in office.

Answer: Smith

The number of people to become Vietnam casualties with the surname Smith was 667, according to the Memorial Directory. Johnson was the second highest with 526, then Williams with 406 (yikes, my surname), and then Brown with 383. According to the figures collected just after the construction of the Vietnam War Memorial, a total of 58152 people in the United States military forces were killed during the Vietnam War.

Answer: 1

There are higher concentrations of native North Americans in certain parts of the U.S., most notably in South-West and Alaska, but across the entire country the average number of Native Americans in comparison with the rest of the population is 1 percent.

The American anthropologist Alfred Louis Kroeber submitted a population total for the area north of Mexico at about 1,150,000 prior to the arrival of European colonists.

Answer: Grover Cleveland

Grover Cleveland was the only president to be married in the White House to Frances Folsom in 1886--and the first to have a child born in the White House, in 1893. He was also the only President elected to two nonconsecutive terms.

Answer: Major General

Although generally known as a traitor, Benedict Arnold played quite a large part in the United States successful split from English control. During the War of Independence, Arnold fought in at least six major battles, being seriously wounded in two of them. Arnold became affronted, however, when he was not awarded the appropriate promotion befitting his status, due to his rash courage and impatient energy, which had aroused the enmity of several other officers.

It was not until he had been severly crippled by wounds that he was promoted to his proper relative rank, but the disaffection had already taken seed. Placed in command of Philadelphia due to his wounds, he began to socialize with English loyalists (actually marrying one of them) and began making overtures to the English at that time, eventually escaping to England when his treachery was revealed. Arnold did not find a hero's welcome in England, however, as he had left behind his English contact in Philadelphia, who was hanged as a spy.