UNITED STATES TRIVIA

marifa (59)in #history • 7 years ago

The oldest city in the U.S. is Saint Augustine, Florida. The Spanish explorer Pedro Menéndez de Avilés established a settlement there in 1565. de Avilés reached shore on August 28, the feast day of St. Augustine, and decided to name the city accordingly.
To be fair, though, it was controlled by the Spanish, and then the British, and then the Spanish again, before it was technically American. The United States acquired the region by treaty in 1821.

Washington, D.C. didn't become the nation's capital until 1790.
The first city to hold the title was Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, when the First Continental Congress met there in 1774.
In the 16 years between then and 1790, a total of seven other cities held the title.
Some, like Baltimore, Maryland and Lancaster, Pennsylvania, only held the title very briefly as the Continental Congress moved around to avoid the British.
New York was the last pre-D.C. city to hold the title. Congress met there for about four years, and George Washington himself was inaugurated as president there. Which is ironic, considering that he's the president Washington, D.C. is named after.

Every single U.S. president has had, at the very least, a half-sibling. The four U.S. presidents who had half-siblings, not full siblings, were Franklin Roosevelt, Gerald Ford, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama.
The president with the most siblings was James Buchanan, the 15th president, who had six sisters and four brothers.

James Buchanan, the 15th president, remained unmarried not only throughout his entire presidency but also throughout his entire life, the only U.S. president to do either of those things.
His niece, Harriet Lane Johnston, served as his first lady. Buchanan was not the only bachelor elected to office.
Grover Cleveland, the 22nd president, was unmarried when he was elected, but he got married while in office. Before then, his first lady was his sister.

The first national monumen enacted in 1906, the American Antiquities Act established the protection of 'natural and cultural resources' in the United States, paving the way for national monuments and parks.
President Theodore Roosevelt wasted no time and proclaimed four national monuments in that same year. The first of those was Devils Tower in Wyoming. This massive column of igneous rock attracts hundreds of thousands of visitors per year.
The first official national park, meanwhile, is Yellowstone in Wyoming, established by President Grant in 1872. The difference between a national monument and a national park, by the way, is that parks specifically have scenic or natural significance, while monuments can have historic or scientific significance of any kind.
Buildings and ruins, for instance, can be monuments, not parks.

This most famous of American landmarks didn't get its name from the mountain it's built on. Nor is it named after the man who sculpted it or any of the people depicted on it.
In 1884, a New Yorker lawyer named Charles Edward Rushmore visited the Black Hills area to verify some legal titles.
According to the National Parks site, Rushmore asked a local guide what the name of the mountain was. The guide replied, 'We will name it now, and name it Rushmore.' And somehow, that name stuck.
What seems like an off-hand comment to please an out-of-towner ended up giving the monument its permanent name.

Thirty-six different people tried to escape from Alcatraz during its 29-year time as a federal prison. Most of them either died during the attempt or were caught.
But in 1962, three criminals vanished from the prison. They made a raft out of stolen raincoats, left dummy heads in their beds Ferris Bueller-style, and escaped by climbing through a ventilator (according to the FBI investigation).
While pieces of their raft were found, the three men themselves were not. The FBI turned the case over to the U.S. Marshals Service in 1979.
The Marshals Service is technically still on the case, though its all but certain that the men are no longer still alive (even if they did survive their escape).

Ohio was the 17th state added to the United States though Congress approved Ohio's request for statehood in 1803, they forgot to officially ratify the state constitution.
It wasn't until 150 years later that Ohio representative George H. Bender made a move to make his state 'Official'.
Congress voted to retroactively ratify the state constitution so that its official date of statehood remained March 1, 1803. But 1953 was the year of admission which would make it the 48th state.

Alaska is 429 times the size of the smallest state, Rhode Island, in terms of area. Even more impressive, its coastline is longer than the coastlines of all 49 other states combined.
Rhode Island has the larger population of the two—by more than 300,000 more people. And is also the state's longest official name: 'State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations.'