12 Basic American Trivia Questions That Virginians Always Get Wrong

Many Americans figure they’d ace a citizenship test. Then the questions start.

Ask where the Pilgrims first landed or which president sits on the $100 bill, and the confident answers begin falling apart.

These are everyday USA facts that trip up Virginians and Americans across the nation.

See how many you can get right before you peek at the answers.

What’s America’s Oldest City?

Most people guess Jamestown or Plymouth.

Both are wrong.

The oldest continuously occupied city in the country is St. Augustine, Florida, founded by the Spanish in 1565.

That’s 42 years before the English settled Jamestown and 55 years before the Mayflower reached Plymouth.

Spanish explorer Pedro Menéndez de Avilés planted the settlement, and people have lived there ever since.

Snowbirds wandering its cobblestone streets are strolling through the oldest European-founded town in the nation.

So, the next time someone credits the Pilgrims with starting it all, you can gently set them straight.

What’s the Biggest State?

Texans, brace yourselves.

The biggest state in the country isn’t the Lone Star State.

Alaska wins by a mile. At more than 660,000 square miles, it’s over twice the size of Texas, with room left over.

Texas does hold the title for largest state in the lower 48, and it wore the overall crown for a while too.

But once Alaska joined the Union in 1959, the title moved north for good.

Its coastline alone runs longer than every other state’s combined.

Bigness, it turns out, depends on remembering that Alaska counts.

Who’s on the $100 Bill?

The question is a trap. The face on the $100 bill never sat in the Oval Office.

That’s Benjamin Franklin, who signed the Declaration of Independence, helped frame the Constitution, and flew a kite in a storm, but never served as president.

He has company.

Alexander Hamilton, the face of the $10 bill, never held the presidency either.

He served as the first Treasury secretary instead.

So if you assumed every face on American currency belonged to a former president, your wallet has been correcting you all along.

Where Did the Pilgrims Land?

Plymouth Rock gets all the glory. It wasn’t the first stop.

When the Mayflower reached America in November 1620, the Pilgrims first dropped anchor at the tip of Cape Cod, near present-day Provincetown.

They even signed the Mayflower Compact there before moving on.

Only weeks later did they cross the bay and settle in Plymouth.

And that famous rock?

No record from the era mentions anyone stepping onto it. The Plymouth Rock tale didn’t surface until more than a century afterward.

The landing happened. The rock is mostly legend.

Does America Have an Official Language?

For almost 250 years, the answer was no.

The United States ran on English without ever naming it the official tongue.

The Founders left it out of the Constitution, and dozens of languages have echoed through the country since.

That changed in March 2025, when an executive order designated English as the official language of the United States for the first time in the nation’s history.

So if you grew up believing English was always official, you were wrong for most of your life and right only lately.

What’s the Official National Bird?

The bald eagle, of course.

But here’s the twist: it became official only recently.

The eagle has starred on the Great Seal since 1782 and shows up on everything from quarters to passports.

Yet for more than two centuries, no law ever named it the national bird.

Congress finally closed that gap, and a bill signed in December 2024 made the bald eagle the official national bird of the United States.

So the bird everyone assumed held the title for ages has worn it for barely a year.

Did Columbus Reach the U.S.?

Schoolkids learn that Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492.

They rarely learn where he landed.

Christopher Columbus never set foot on the mainland of what’s now the United States.

His voyages took him to the Caribbean, including the Bahamas, Hispaniola, and Cuba.

The first European known to reach North America was the Norse explorer Leif Erikson, who arrived around the year 1000, roughly five centuries earlier.

He died still convinced he’d reached the East Indies.

So the man with the holiday and the famous rhyme missed the continental U.S. entirely.

When Was the Declaration Signed?

July 4, 1776, right?

Not quite.

The Continental Congress approved the text of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, which is why the date gets the fireworks.

But almost nobody signed it that day.

Most of the 56 signers put their names to the document on August 2, 1776, nearly a month later.

A few signed even after that.

So the famous scene of everyone gathered around on the Fourth is more painting than history.

The vote happened then. The signing mostly came later.

How Many Stripes Are on the Flag?

Plenty of people picture a flag bursting with stripes. There are 13.

The stripes have held at 13 since the start, one for each original colony.

The stars are the part that grows, climbing to 50 as states joined.

The country briefly flew a 15-stripe flag after Vermont and Kentucky arrived in the 1790s.

It looked cluttered, so Congress reset the stripes to 13 in 1818 and decided to add a star, not a stripe, for each new state.

Count them next time. Thirteen, every one.

What Did Paul Revere Shout?

Not “The British are coming.” That line is pure Hollywood.

On his 1775 midnight ride, Revere needed to stay discreet, and the colonists still considered themselves British anyway, so the phrase would have made little sense.

Accounts suggest he warned that “the Regulars are coming out.”

He also didn’t finish the ride.

British troops detained him before he reached Concord, and other riders carried the alarm the rest of the way.

Longfellow’s 1860 poem turned Revere into a lone hero. The real night had a fuller cast.

How Old Is the National Anthem?

Older words, surprisingly young as an anthem.

Francis Scott Key wrote the poem that became “The Star-Spangled Banner” in 1814, during the War of 1812, after watching the bombardment of Fort McHenry.

But it didn’t become the official national anthem until Congress made it so in 1931, more than a century later.

For generations before that, the country had no official anthem at all.

So the song feels woven into the founding, yet it’s younger as an anthem than your great-grandparents were.

Was ‘Under God’ Always in the Pledge?

Many assume the Pledge of Allegiance has always described one nation “under God.”

It hasn’t.

A minister named Francis Bellamy wrote the original Pledge in 1892, and his version didn’t include those two words at all.

Congress added “under God” in 1954, during the Cold War, at the urging of religious groups and President Eisenhower.