What Did These Americans Do? Trivia Quiz

Answer: Actor

Katharine Hepburn (1907-2003) was the first actress to collect four Oscars. Hepburn was born in Connecticut and obtained a Bachelor of Arts (history and philosophy) at Bryn Mawr in 1928. While still studying, she started acting on stage with little success - until 1932, her umptieth theatre play "The Warrior's Husband". But then she enrolled in film making, debuting with "A Bill of Divorcement" (1932).

Hepburn won her first Oscar for "Morning Glory" (1933) in the role of an aspiring actress, but most of her subsequent twelve movies had a poor box office receipt. Even "Bringing Up Baby" (1938), praised by the critics, did not make much money. Things went better with "The Philadelphia Story" (1940), with an Oscar nomination.

In "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" (1967) Hepburn played the role of a white mother surprised by her daughter's intention to marry a black man. The movie earned her a second Oscar.

The next year, Hepburn won her third Oscar - now for the role of Eleanor of Aquitaine in "The Lion in Winter". In 1981, Katharine Hepburn starred with Henry Fonda as an elderly couple in "On Golden Pond". Fonda won his first and only Best Actor Oscar, and Hepburn won an unprecedented fourth Oscar.

Answer: Painter

Grant Wood (1891-1942) was born in Iowa and studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is best known for his paintings, although he also was creative with other materials, such as carpentry and stained glass. In 1918 he painted camouflage scenes for the army, and after the war he took up a teacher's position.

In 1930 Grant Wood completed his best known painting "American Gothic": portrait of a grumpy old farmer holding a pitchfork, with his daughter (also mid-age or older) giving him a surly look, and the façade of their farm in the background.

Answer: Musician

Bruce Springsteen was born in 1949 in New Jersey. After hearing the Beatles, he bought himself a guitar and from then on his life was dominated by music. Springsteen played lead guitar with several bands until 1972, when he formed the E Street Band to which he played lead guitar. Columbia Records hired them, and they recorded their first two albums in 1973. In 1975 followed an album on which Springsteen had struggled for months: "Born to Run", a major breakthrough.

Other major albums are "The River" (1980) and "Born in the USA" (1984). Springsteen won an Oscar for Best Song for "The Streets of Philadelphia" (1994). Besides, he amassed no less than 20 Grammy Awards, four of those for the "Streets of Philadelphia" alone.

Answer: Judge

Joan Ruth Bader was born in New York in 1933. As there were several Joans in her class in primary school, she chose to use her second name Ruth. She married Martin Ginsburg in 1954. Bader Ginsburg studied law at Cornell (bachelor degree) and Harvard, graduating at Columbia Law School. Her collaboration at the start of the 1960s with a Swedish colleague Anders Bruzelius convinced her of the cause of gender equality, then a hot topic in Sweden.

In 1972 Bader Ginsburg was one of the founders of the Women's Right Project within the American Civil Liberties Union. As director of this project, Bader Ginsburg chose to plead several cases of gender discrimination before The Supreme Court, winning almost all of these. Bader Ginsburg was confirmed as a judge on the Court of Appeal of Washington DC in 1980, and made herself a reputation of moderate judge. In 1993 Bader Ginsburg was appointed one of the judges of the Supreme Court. She would remain on this post until her death in 2020, aged 87.

Answer: Politician

Nancy D'Alesandro, born in 1940 in Maryland, married Paul Pelosi in 1963. Thus her name is Nancy Pelosi. Nancy's father was a Democratic congressman for Maryland, and her mother was also engaged in political campaigns. Her brother Thomas also was elected council member in the city of Boston and would eventually be nominated Mayor.

So at a very early age Pelosi already joined the Democratic party. Having led the California branch of the Democratic Party for a few years, she was elected to the House of Representatives for the first time in 1987 in a special election and won the next 19 consecutive re-elections.

In 2007 Pelosi became Speaker of the House, the first woman to hold this title. Her term ended in 2007 because the majority in the House of Representatives shifted to the Republicans. But when the Democrats reconquered the majority in 2019, Pelosi was chosen for a second term as Speaker of the House, term which ended in 2023.

Answer: Athlete

Michael Phelps was born in Maryland in 1985, the youngest of three children. When both his sisters started swimming, he joined the rest of the family - but soon was the better by far. In the Olympic Games at Sydney 2000 Phelps competed, but did not win any medal.

What a contrast with his next Olympic Games: Athens 2004. He won four individual gold medals, one team gold medal for a final he swam, one team gold medal although he did not swim the finals (4*100m medley), one bronze medal on an individual event and one bronze medal in a team medley.

In 2008 in Beijing Phelps outdid himself by winning five individual gold medals and three gold medals in the team events. And on seven of the eight events he swam, Phelps established a new world record time - only in the 100m butterfly he got a "mere" Olympic record. In London 2012 Phelps declared that he would not compete in eight events any longer. But he started in six events, winning four of them and claiming silver in the other two.

After The London Olympics Phelps retired, but he came back another time - for the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro. Once more he started in six events, winning five of these. On the 100m butterfly he won a silver medal.

Discarding the 4*100m medley in 2004 (as he did not compete in the finals), Phelps won thus 22 gold medals, 4 silver medals and 2 bronze. Of these 28 medals a whopping 16 were individual (13 times individual gold, twice individual silver and once individual bronze).

Answer: Architect

Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959) was born in Wisconsin. From 1887 to 1889 he studied civil engineering at the university of Wisconsin-Madison, but did not graduate. Instead he overlooked the plans for the interior of the All Souls Church in Chicago built at the request of Wright's uncle Jenkin Loyd Jones, and this church is considered Wright's first building ever.

At first Wright worked for the architecture company Silsbee, then five years for Adler & Sullivan. In 1893 Wright started working for his own firm, at first working in the popular styles of that time but gradually inserting more and more of the style he would develop himself : the "Prairie Style", with emphasis on horizontal lines, broad overhanging eaves, and integration in the landscape. The first true examples were the Willits House and the Thomas House, both built in 1901 in Chicago suburbs.

In the 1910s Wright took his first commissions outside of the USA, including the Banff National Park Pavilion in Canada (1914) and the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo (Japan, 1923). Notwithstanding working abroad for many years, the best examples of Frank Lloyd Wright's buildings can still be found in the USA: his own home Taliesin in Wisconsin, the residential home Fallingwater in Pennsylvania (built around a waterfall), and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City.

Answer: Inventor

Mary Anderson (1866-1953) was born in Alabama and would never marry. There are no reliable sources about her childhood education. At first Anderson acted as a property developer, responsible for the Fairmont Apartments in Birmingham, Alabama. But in 1893 she moved to California, where she bought a ranch and vineyard.

In the winters of 1900 and 1902 Anderson traveled to New York City, and was appalled by the way drivers tried to keep their windshields clean. Most of the time automobile chauffeurs and tramway conductors would lean out of the side window and scrape the front windshield with their hands or a sponge, or they would halt the vehicle, step outside and start cleaning. Anderson came up with a simple contraption: a wiper blade controlled by a lever inside the vehicle, and pressed against the front windshield by a counterweight.

Anderson took the first patent for these windshield wipers in 1903, but it was restricted to a period of 17 years. And only after the patent elapsed, the windshield wipers became a commercial success.

Answer: Nurse

Clarissa Barton was born in Massachusetts in 1821. Her first name was usually shortened to Clara. Young Clara nursed her brother for a serious head injury when she was only ten years old, and learned by practice the art of nursing.
Clara's first job was teaching.

When she quit teaching in 1855, she was hired as a clerk on the national patent office. But she became best known for the work she volunteered to do when the American Civil War started: she started nursing the wounded soldiers (Union but also Confederate), and launched public campaigns to find supplies (medical supplies, but also food and clothing for the wounded).

After the war, Clara Barton headed for three years a committee tasked with finding and identifying the deceased soldiers and answering letters from their family members. In 1868 she moved to Europe, where she met a few members of the Red Cross (at that time only active in Europe, Russia and Turkey).

From 1873 onwards, Barton tried to convince the American government to recognize the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), and to establish an American branch of this humanitarian organization. In 1881 the American branch of the Red Cross was indeed founded, and she was nominated the first President of the American Red Cross.

Clara Barton was perhaps one of the first to direct the attention of the Red Cross towards natural disasters, as the ICRC initially only provided assistance to wounded soldiers on the battlefield. Clara Barton published her autobiography in 1908 and died in 1912.

Answer: Author

Edgar Poe was born in 1809 in Massachusetts. In 1810 his father left the family, and in 1811 his mother died, so he was taken in by the Allan family. Although they didn't formally adopt young Edgar, he chose their family name as middle name. Hence the full name Edgar Allan Poe.

Poe started writing in 1827 and would eventually become the first American author who could live of his pen alone, although it would take him quite a few years and even then he barely eked out. Meanwhile he worked odd jobs, for a while in the military.

When Poe died in 1849, he left more than twenty short stories (including "The Murders in the Rue Morgue", acknowledged as the first mystery story), more than a dozen well-known poems (including "Annabel Lee" and "The Raven"), and one complete novel ("The Narrative of Gordon Pym of Nantucket").