MENTAL STATES: US

1. Fifty-six, although they didn’t all sign on the same date. One of those who signed, Richard Stockton, later recanted. Eight of the signatories were born in Britain. Twenty-six copies survive; one was found in the back of a painting bought at a Philadelphia flea market in 1989. The painting cost $4; the declaration was eventually sold for $8.1 million in 2000.

2. Fourteen. The flag was sewn by Mary Pickersgill, born appropriately in 1776, her daughter, two nieces and an indentured servant. The song was written after Fort McHenry in Baltimore survived a British bombardment.

3. Bacon’s rebellion. The dissidents, led by Nathaniel Bacon, were rebelling against the rule of Sir William Berkeley, governor of Virginia. The settlers wanted a harsher policy against Native Americans.

4. Five. John Quincy Adams (1824), Rutherford B. Hayes (1876), Benjamin Harrison (1888), George W. Bush (2000) and Donald Trump (2016). Victory is dependent not on the popular vote, but on a majority in the electoral college. Mr Trump’s 306 electoral college votes ranked 46th in the 58 elections.

5. 11%. The Senate was deliberately designed to balance the power of the large and small states. It was also designed, according to James Madison, to be a check on the House of Representatives and “protect the people against the transient impressions into which they themselves might be led”. Originally, senators were chosen by state legislatures, rather than popularly elected.

6. John Adams, the second president. He and John Quincy Adams are the only two among the first dozen presidents not to own slaves and often hundreds of them, though Martin Van Buren only had one. After Zachary Taylor, slave-owning presidents fell out of favour until Andrew Johnson and Ulysses S. Grant, both former slave owners, got the top job.

7. Alexis de Tocqueville. To improve their career prospects after Louis Philippe took the French throne in 1830, de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont visited America to study the penal system. The pair spent just nine months in America, visiting prisons across the country, before returning to France to submit their report. De Tocqueville then drew on his experience to write his masterpiece on American politics and culture.

8. Montana. The clash, called the Battle of the Greasy Grass by the Indians and also referred to as Custer’s Last Stand, took place between the 7th Cavalry, led by General Custer, and a huge gathering of Sioux and Cheyenne warriors in 1876. Custer was unaware of the number of Indians under the command of Sitting Bull. His troops were outnumbered and quickly overwhelmed in an ignominious defeat that did not go unpunished.

9. Morgan and Virgil. The gunfight took place in Tombstone, Arizona, in 1881 and lasted about half a minute, during which time some 30 shots were fired. Doc Holliday was a dentist.

10. Five: Colorado, Idaho, Kansas, Nevada and North Dakota. Its presidential candidate was James B. Weaver. In 1896, the party backed the Democratic candidate, William Jennings Bryan, who campaigned against the gold standard. The party was an early example of anti-elitist populism.

11. William Howard Taft, who was president from 1909 to 1913 and Chief Justice from 1921 to 1930. He was also the heaviest president, hitting 152–154kg (335–340 pounds) at one stage.

12. Three. Teddy Roosevelt in 1906, Woodrow Wilson in 1919 and Jimmy Carter in 2002

13. Just one day. She was chosen as an honour by the state’s governor after the incumbent died. A special election saw her immediately replaced. She was also the oldest freshman senator, taking her seat at age 87.

14. Brent Bozell, the brother-in-law of William F. Buckley Jr, who founded the National Review. Goldwater, the Republican nominee in 1964, was the inspiration for many modern Conservatives, and said in his convention speech that “extremism in the defence of liberty is no vice”. His slogan was “In your heart, you know he’s right”, but this was countered by Lyndon Johnson who quipped “In your guts, you know he’s nuts”. Johnson won in a landslide.

15. It lifted the ban on interracial marriage. Mildred and Richard Loving had been sentenced to a year in prison in Virginia for marrying each other.

16. The Missouri at 3,767km (2,341 miles).

17. Hawaii at 1,618mm (64 inches) a year and Nevada at 241mm.

18. Wyoming produced around 42% of the country’s coal output in 2015, well ahead of West Virginia (11%), the state most usually associated with the fuel.

19. Bureau of Land Management (BLM), Forest Service (FS), Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) and National Park Service (NPS). The federal government owns some 640 million acres of land in the United States and the four federal agencies manage 610 million acres as follows: BLM 248 million acres, FS 193 million acres; FWS 89 million acres; and NPS 80 million acres. Most of these lands are in the West and in Alaska.

20. Alaska, Florida, Nevada, South Dakota, Texas, Washington, Wyoming. All these states raise money for services through sales and property taxes and the like. Tennessee and New Hampshire come close. The states do not tax pay but do tax interest and dividends.

21. A worrying 30% were unclear about where their chosen party stood. Only about a fifth of voters pay close attention to politics. For the rest, political issues are, as Robert Dahl, a noted political scientist, put it in 1961, “a sideshow in the great circus of life”.

22. 26th. The US is an outlier thanks to a system that inflates healthcare spending. Europeans, such as the Swiss and Italians, live more than four years longer.

23. A one-piece swimming costume. Reagan worked as a lifeguard at Lowell Park beach on the Rock River. He is credited with saving over 70 people from drowning, though there are suggestions that some young ladies may have faked their distress to attract the attention of the handsome young lifeguard.

24. Sauerkraut. The menus in some congressional office buildings changed the name of “French fries” to “freedom fries” in 2003 after France refused to support America in its stance over Iraq.

25. St Louis, Missouri. Eliot was a poet, dramatist and literary critic best known for his poem, The Waste Land. Chuck Berry was a poet of rock ’n’ roll best known for “Johnny B. Goode” and “Roll Over Beethoven”. Yogi Berra was a baseball catcher who appeared in 14 World Series for the New York Yankees and won 10 of them but is also known for his poetically daft utterances such as “When you come to a fork in the road, take it”.

26. The Dakota apartments on the upper west side of Manhattan. The apartments were first built in the 1880s. John Lennon was murdered outside the block in 1980.

27. Eighteen. The boards date back to the 1920s and collected $58 million in taxes in 2011. America has a tradition of electing local officials.

28. Seventeen. Those states and parts of Alaska, Maryland, Minnesota and South Dakota control the wholesale sale of spirits and, in some cases, wine, through government agencies. Thirteen also control retail sales for home consumption through government-operated shops or appointed agents.

29. a) North Carolina b) New Hampshire c) Wisconsin.

30. Nebraska. It switched from a bicameral system in 1937.

31. Lake Pontchartrain Causeway in Louisiana, which is 38.4km (23.87 miles) long.

32. One of the longest road tunnels in America. The 1.6 mile (2.6km) tunnel was part of one of the most complex and pricey pieces of infrastructure engineering in America. The “Big Dig” included a bridge and several tunnels including the Ted Williams Tunnel, which opened in 1995.

33. a) Idlewild in New York b) National in Arlington, Virginia (it services Washington, DC) c) Houston Intercontinental.

34. Louis Kahn. He was born in Pärnu, Estonia, in 1901 and his family emigrated to America when he was a child. After studying architecture at the University of Pennsylvania and opening his own firm in 1935, it was many years before he was recognised as one of the greatest architects of the 20th century with buildings that also included the Yale University Art Gallery, Kimbell Art Museum and the capitol complex in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Kahn died in New York City in 1974.

35. Eugene Cernan. Cernan and Harrison Schmitt stepped out of the lunar module of Apollo 17 and onto the moon in December 1972. In total only 12 people have done so. Cernan, commander of Apollo 17, also uttered the last words (so far) on the moon: “America’s challenge of today has forged man’s destiny of tomorrow. And, as we leave the Moon at Taurus-Littrow, we leave as we came and, God willing, as we shall return, with peace and hope for all mankind. Godspeed to the crew of Apollo 17.”

36. Hawaii. The average life expectancy in America now stands at 78.9 years. But Hawaiians live for 81.3 years on average, just edging out Minnesotans who hang around for 81.1 years.

37. 2001. A plurality (43%) approved in 1982 but approval fell during the AIDS crisis and only rebounded decisively around the turn of the millennium.

38. Spruce Goose. The plane, six-times larger than any that existed at the time, was built out of wood because of government restrictions on using aluminium, which was needed for the war effort. It was conceived to ferry troops and war supplies across the Atlantic Ocean out of reach of German U-boats but arrived too late. Despite its name it was made mostly of birch.

39. a) Michigan b) Ohio c) Alabama.

40. a) New Mexico b) Arizona c) Alaska.

41. 2007. There were fewer than 500 breeding pairs at one stage thanks to the impact of pesticides like DDT, loss of habitat and hunting.

42. The Great Smoky Mountains park on the border of North Carolina and Tennessee is the most visited site.

43. Mount Saint-Elias. Denali was formerly known as Mount McKinley. The 10 highest peaks are all in Alaska; the highest in the lower 48 states is Mount Whitney in California.

44. Yupik, with 19,000 speakers. Although there are an estimated 169 Native American languages, there are only around 370,000 speakers in total.

45. Thirty-eight million. The total Hispanic population was estimated at 55 million in 2014, or around 17% of the total for the United States.

46. Near San Bernadino, California. Mac and Dick McDonald originally sold barbecue but focused on hamburgers after 1948 and gradually made the outfit more specialised and efficient. Ray Kroc persuaded them to franchise the operation in 1954 and bought the brothers’ interest for $2.7 million in 1961.

47. R.E.M. and the B-52s.

48. a) Cleveland, Ohio b) Canton, Ohio c) Dayton, Ohio. Ohio has 17 halls of fame in all, including ones for accounting and polka.

49. (Bonnie) Parker and (Clyde) Barrow. Played by Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway in an Oscar-winning film, the pair graduated from petty theft to robbing banks and killing policemen in a spree lasing two years until they were shot and killed by cops in Louisiana in 1934. Their gang was probably responsible for 13 murders, including those of two policemen.

50. Superbowl Sunday, the final of the American football competition. In 2017, Americans consumed an estimated 1.3 billion chicken wings, 12.5 million pizzas and 86 million kgs (190 million lbs) of avocados on that day.