Who Is America? Trivia Quiz

Arlington National Cemetery was established in 1864 on the estate confiscated by the US federal government from the family of Confederate general Robert E. Lee. Arlington House, which appears in the photo, is now a memorial to Lee. Located in Arlington County in Northern Virginia, not far from the shore of the Potomac River, the cemetery - one of two national cemeteries managed by the US Army - covers 639 acres (259 ha) of land, in which over 400,000 people are buried. The Arlington Memorial Bridge, built in 1932, links the cemetery to the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC - symbolizing the reunion of North and South after the Civil War.

Arlington National Cemetery contains a number of monuments and memorials of great national import, such as the Tomb of the Unknowns, the Memorial Amphitheater, and the John F. Kennedy Eternal Flame. The 35th President of the US, John F. Kennedy (who was also a hero of WWII) was buried in Arlington National Cemetery three days after his assassination in Dallas on 22 November 1963. The eternal flame was placed over the president's grave according to the wishes of his widow, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, who lit it at the end of the burial services. The permanent grave site, located on the hill below Arlington House, opened on 15 March 1967: along with John F. and Jacqueline Kennedy (who died in 1994), their children Patrick and Arabella, who died in infancy, are also buried there. The graves of John's brothers, Robert and Ted, are located nearby.

Located on the west bank of the Mississippi River, at the site where the city of St Louis (Missouri) was founded in 1764, the Gateway Arch is the world's tallest arch, and the tallest man-made monument in the US - towering over the river with its height of 192 m (630 ft). Designed in 1947 by Finnish-American architect Eero Saarinen, it was meant as a monument to the westward expansion of the nation, and thus is also known as the Gateway to the West. The monument was built between 1963 and 1965 in the shape of a weighted catenary arch clad in stainless steel, and inaugurated on 10 June 1967.

The arch is the centrepiece of Gateway Arch National Park, established in 2018 near the starting point of the Corps of Discovery Expedition, led by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark and commissioned by President Thomas Jefferson after the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. The expedition set out from the settlement of St. Charles on the Missouri River (now a suburb of St. Louis) on 14 May 1804, and crossed the newly-acquired lands west of the Mississippi, finally reaching the Pacific Ocean in 1805. The two explorers returned in September 1806, 862 days later - having accumulated a large body of knowledge on these territories, their environment and the peoples who resided there. Lewis and Clark were accompanied for most of their journey by Sacagawea, a young Native American woman, whose contribution was essential to the expedition's success.

One of the most powerful symbols of American independence, the Liberty Bell was commissioned in 1752 by the Pennsylvania Provincial Assembly. The first bell, cast in London, cracked when it was rung the first time, and was recast twice in Philadelphia: its current, distinctive crack appeared between 1817 and 1846, after many decades of regular use. The Bell was originally hung in the steeple of the Pennsylvania State House, now known as Independence Hall (shown in the photo's background). In the late 19th century and early 20th century, it was taken to various exhibitions and celebrations around the country, which worsened its condition - so that after 1915 it did not leave Philadelphia again. Since 2003, the Bell resides in the Liberty Bell Center, which is part of the Independence National Historical Park (established in 1948). Independence Hall, where the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the US were debated and adopted, was designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1979.

Although born in Boston, Benjamin Franklin lived in Philadelphia most of his life, with the exception of a few years in London when he was in his late teens, and the years he spent in France (1776-1785) as ambassador of the newly formed United States. Along with his activity as a printer and publisher, he became increasingly involved in politics and the cause of American independence from Great Britain. Chosen as the Pennsylvania delegate to the Second Continental Congress, in June 1776 he was appointed as one of the members of the Committee of Five who drafted the Declaration of Independence - adopted on 4 July 1776 in Independence Hall. After serving as President of Pennsylvania from 1785 to 1788, Franklin died in Philadelphia in 1790, and was buried in the city's Christ Church Burial Ground.

Located in the centre of Florida's Atlantic coast, Cape Canaveral is part of the region known as the Space Coast due to the presence of two major rocket launch sites - the Kennedy Space Centre (owned by NASA) on Merritt Island, and the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station (owned by the US Department of Defense). The two sites are separated by a lagoon known as the Banana River. The facility at Cape Canaveral, home to a number of launch complexes, was established in 1949 by President Harry S Truman; between 1964 and 1974 it was known as Cape Kennedy Air Force Station. Parts of the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station are designated as a National Historic Landmark.

Some of the first crewed spaceflight programmes - namely Project Mercury, Project Gemini and the Apollo 7 mission - were launched from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. However, the Apollo 11 mission, which landed the first humans on the surface of the Moon on 20 July 1969, was launched from the larger Kennedy Space Center. Neil Armstrong, the first person to walk on the Moon, began his career in the US Navy, becoming a naval aviator in 1950; he then became a test pilot in 1955. He joined the NASA Astronaut Corps in 1962, and made his first spaceflight with the Gemini 8 mission in March 1966. After the successful Apollo 11 mission, which he commanded, Armstrong worked for some time as a university professor, and later collaborated with NASA in investigations on the aborted Apollo 13 mission and the Challenger disaster. He died on 25 August, 2012: many places in the US and elsewhere, as well as a lunar crater and an asteroid, have been named for him.

Founded in 1624 by Dutch traders with the name of Fort Amsterdam (later New Amsterdam) at the southern tip of Manhattan Island, New York was named after the Duke of York (the future King James II) when it came under British control in 1664. It is the most populous city in the US: its five boroughs are home to nearly 9 million people, and its urban and metro areas to an estimated 20 million. One of the world's most important centres for finance, business, science, education and culture, New York is a bustling, ethnically and linguistically diverse megacity, with more than one-third of its residents born outside the US. With such an impressive pedigree, it is no surprise that New York has also been frequently used as the setting for many iconic films - often directed by natives of the city.

Born in the borough of Queens, Martin Scorsese is a third-generation Italian-American who grew up in Manhattan's Little Italy. Though he had to wait until 2006 to win an Academy Award for Best Director (for "The Departed") in spite of ten nominations, he is widely regarded as one of the most influential directors in the history of cinema, and has received many accolades during nearly six decades of film-making career. Strongly influenced by his background, many of Scorsese's films are set in New York, and frequently star Robert De Niro, a fellow Italian-American from New York. Along with violent, hard-hitting movies such as "Taxi Driver" (1976), "Goodfellas" (1990) and "Gangs of New York" (2002), Scorsese also directed the romantic comedy "New York, New York" (1977) as a tribute to his hometown, and the period drama "The Age of Innocence" (1993), based on Edith Wharton's novel of the same name, set in 1870s New York.

Located at the western end of Washington DC's National Mall, the Lincoln Memorial was built in 1922 to honour the 16th President of the US, who was assassinated in the nation's capital on 15 April 1865. The stately, white-marble building was designed by architect Henry Bacon in a Neoclassical style reminiscent of an Ancient Greek temple. The walls of the central chamber, which houses a huge seated statue of Abraham Lincoln by sculptor Daniel Chester French, are carved with inscriptions of Lincoln's second inaugural address (pronounced a few weeks before his assassination) and his Gettysburg Address of November 1863. A flight of steps leads from the memorial's entrance to the Reflecting Pool, to the east of which towers the Washington Monument.

In the years since its construction, the Lincoln Memorial has been the site of many famous speeches and events, connected in particular to the American Civil Rights Movement. The most significant of these was the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, held on 28 August 1963. This historic rally, which saw the participation of an estimated 250,000 people, culminated with Dr Martin Luther King Jr.'s impassioned "I Have a Dream" speech, delivered in front of the memorial. In this speech, widely regarded as one of the greatest in American history, King pleaded for the end of segregation and racial injustice. A Baptist minister and civil rights activist, King was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1964 for his efforts in combating racism through nonviolent resistance. Tragically, he was assassinated in Memphis only four years later, on 4 April 1968, at the age of 39.

The island of Nantucket is located at the southeasternmost point of Massachusetts and the whole New England region. Its name, of uncertain meaning, comes from the language of the Native American Wampanoag people, the indigenous inhabitants of the island. Settled in 1641, the town on the island acquired its present name in 1795. The whaling industry for which Nantucket is known started in the late 17th century, and developed throughout the 18th century with the help of the native population - reaching its zenith in the first half of the 19th century, before in 1846 a fire destroyed most of the town and led many people to leave. After almost a century of uninterrupted decline, Nantucket rebounded in the mid-20th century, when much of the historic town was restored and turned into an upmarket tourist destination - which it remains to this day.

When Herman Melville wrote his best-known novel, "Moby-Dick" (1851), Nantucket was no longer the world's foremost whaling centre. However, in the book the town (introduced in Chapter 14) is described as a sea power, in spite of its isolation and less than fortunate environment. The Pequod sails from Nantucket on its fateful voyage, and both the monomaniacal Captain Ahab and young chief mate Starbuck are natives of the town. The main source of inspiration for Melville's novel was the account of the sinking of the Nantucket whaling ship Essex by a sperm whale in November 1820. Born in New York in 1819, Melville was living in a farmhouse in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, when he wrote most of "Moby-Dick" - one of the candidates to the title of "Great American Novel". Though he had had first-hand experience of whaling in the early 1840s, the ship where he worked sailed from Fairhaven, another major Massachusetts whaling port.

The iconic Sleeping Beauty Castle stands at the centre of Disneyland, the first theme park opened by the Walt Disney Company. The park, which welcomes millions of visitors every year (nearly 20 million in 2023), is located in Anaheim (California). The only Disney theme park whose design and construction were directly supervised by Walt Disney, it officially opened on 17 July 1955, and has been greatly expanded ever since. Disney got the idea for the park when he was visiting Griffith Park in Los Angeles with his daughters; another major source of inspiration was Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen, one of the world's three oldest amusement parks. Here shown in full Christmas season regalia, Sleeping Beauty Castle was based on the spectacular, 19th-century Neuschwanstein Castle in Bavaria (Germany). Its silhouette graced the logo of Walt Disney Pictures from 1985 to 2006 before being merged with Magic Kingdom's Cinderella Castle. Similar castles are found in Disneyland Paris and Disneyland Hong Kong.

A Chicago native, Walt Disney was interested in drawing since childhood, and became a commercial illustrator in his late teens, eventually moving to California in 1923. There he formed the Disney Brothers Studio with his brother Roy. The creation of the character of Mickey Mouse in 1928 was the beginning of Disney's successful career in the entertainment industry. In the following decades, before he passed away in 1966, he built a media empire that encompasses animated and live-action films, TV, music, theme parks and other enterprises. The Walt Disney Company's corporate headquarters are located at the Walt Disney Studios in Burbank (California).

Located on top of a hill in the Whitehaven neighbourhood of Memphis (Tennessee), Graceland is a stately mansion surrounded by a 13.8-acre (5.6-ha) estate. Designed by the Memphis architectural firm Furbringer and Ehrmanis, the two-story house was built in 1939 in the Colonial Revival style for Ruth Moore, a Memphis socialite. As his musical career was taking off, in 1957 singer Elvis Presley bought the house and its grounds for himself and his family for the price of $102,500. Presley spent many times that amount to modify the house according to his tastes, and lived in the luxurious, 23-room mansion for the rest of his life. He died there on 16 August 1977, at the age of 42, and is buried in the Meditation Garden next to the house along with his parents, his paternal grandmother, his daughter Lisa Marie (who passed away in 2023), and his grandson. Listed in the National Register of Historic Places since 1991, Graceland was opened to the public in 1982 by Presley's widow, Priscilla, and is visited by hundreds of thousands of people every year.

Born in 1935, Elvis Presley - nicknamed the King of Rock and Roll - was a native of Tupelo (Mississippi), but his family moved to Memphis when he was 13 years old. The Mississippi border lies just a few miles south of Graceland. Memphis' thriving music scene - in particular the blues hub of Beale Street - was a great influence on the singer as he was growing up. It was also in Memphis that he recorded his very first songs in 1953, at the legendary Sun Studio (then called Memphis Recording Service). Presley recorded over 20 songs on the Sun label, which was also instrumental in launching the careers of Roy Orbison and Johnny Cash.

Located in the Laurel Highlands of southwestern Pennsylvania, about 116 km (72 mi) southeast of Pittsburgh, the site where the magnificent Fallingwater house was built between 1936 and 1639 was originally a summer retreat for the employees of Kaufmann's department store in Pittsburgh.

The store's owner, Edgar J. Kaufmann, bought the site in 1922, and the following year hired renowned architect Frank Lloyd Wright to design a house Kaufmann and his wife intended to use as a summer residence. The three-story house was partly built over a waterfall (hence its name) on the Bear Run stream. In spite of structural problems that plagued the house after its completion, the Kaufmanns continued to use it until 1963, when Edgar Kaufmann Jr. donated Fallingwater to the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy, which conducted extensive repairs before turning it into a museum. Fallingwater, together with other buildings designed by Wright, was designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2019.

An outstanding example of Wright's organic architecture, which strives for harmony between human habitation and its natural setting, Fallingwater is characterized by its cantilevered concrete terraces and asymmetrical floor plan. It is widely regarded as the influential architect's masterpiece, and one of the most iconic buildings of the 20th century. Wright designed over 1,000 buildings throughout his long career (he died in 1959 at the age of 91). Although the vast majority of his works are found within the US, he was also active internationally, in particular in Japan, where he designed the famed Imperial Hotel in Tokyo. His last major work, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City, was inaugurated a few months after Wright's death.