Who were the first 8 Presidents of the U.S.?

This shoud be a new topic but anyways:
How many u.s. presidents in whom`s term u.s. has not been involved in a military conflict, can you name? Starting from the latest.

Obelix

Originally posted by theindependentjournal
In the name of Denying Ignorance I am curious as to how many of you can answer this without Googling it.

I bet none, prove me wrong!

Now here's a link but be HONEST in your responses whether you knew or not and then ask yourselves why wasn't I taught this in school?

First 8 Presidents

I knew about St. Clair. My wife is his great (x6)- grand daughter. He was the prez when the Constitution was ratified I believe.

reply to post by theindependentjournal




Thank you for sharing that back in 2008! Had to bring it back. Never knew this... Even if we get into all the vocabulary of it, we still had 8 other men run our country before Washington... It's a shame how our education system is all screwed up. I wish I had the means to home school my son. He's 4 now, so hopefully by the time he's in 2nd grade, I'll be "comfortable" and can do this. I HAVE to.

I just started school again, and have been learning a lot more than I thought "they'd" be teaching me... Just found out about the Arawak Indians (forgot their names I think that's what it is) becoming extinct after being enslaved by Columbus and taken to Haiti. As well as other Indians dying off from location (cold).

It's unfair how the system is, which is why I'm steering away from it (once I graduate and pay off my debts of course - until then still enslaved)

reply to post by TaintedVisions


Also, that would make more sense on how Thanksgiving came to be (Hanson declaring it a Holiday). Not Indians and Spaniards celebrating whatever it is we've been taught.

The only reason I could do this is because of the presidents song from the Animaniacs cartoon. I watched that show as a kid and memorized all their songs. The president song, the nations of the world, all 50 states and their capitals.......etc. For anyone interested here is the presidents song

Originally posted by Anonymous ATS
This shoud be a new topic but anyways:
How many u.s. presidents in whom`s term u.s. has not been involved in a military conflict, can you name? Starting from the latest.

Obelix

Presidents who did not preside over foreign war during their terms:

John Adams
John Quincy Adams
Zachary Taylor
Millard Fillmore
Franklin Pierce
Andrew Johnson
Ulysses Grant
James Garfield
Chester Arthur
Grover Cleveland
Theodore Roosevelt
William Taft
Calvin Coolidge
Herbert Hoover
Jimmy Carter

* possible "Indian" conflicts within the U.S. Territories ?

reply to post by theindependentjournal


They're the sort of scores that drive high-school history teachers to drink. When NEWSWEEK recently asked 1,000 U.S. citizens to take America's official citizenship test, 29 percent couldn't name the vice president. Seventy-three percent couldn't correctly say why we fought the Cold War. Forty-four percent were unable to define the Bill of Rights. And 6 percent couldn't even circle Independence Day on a calendar.
Don't get us wrong: civic ignorance is nothing new. For as long as they've existed, Americans have been misunderstanding checks and balances and misidentifying their senators. And they've been lamenting the philistinism of their peers ever since pollsters started publishing these dispiriting surveys back in Harry Truman's day. (He was a president, by the way.) According to a study by Michael X. Delli Carpini, dean of the Annenberg School for Communication, the yearly shifts in civic knowledge since World War II have averaged out to "slightly under 1 percent."

But the world has changed. And unfortunately, it's becoming more and more inhospitable to incurious know-nothings—like us.
To appreciate the risks involved, it's important to understand where American ignorance comes from. In March 2009, the European Journal of Communication asked citizens of Britain, Denmark, Finland, and the U.S. to answer questions on international affairs. The Europeans clobbered us. Sixty-eight percent of Danes, 75 percent of Brits, and 76 percent of Finns could, for example, identify the Taliban, but only 58 percent of Americans managed to do the same—even though we've led the charge in Afghanistan. It was only the latest in a series of polls that have shown us lagging behind our First World peers.
Most experts agree that the relative complexity of the U.S. political system makes it hard for Americans to keep up. In many European countries, parliaments have proportional representation, and the majority party rules without having to "share power with a lot of subnational governments," notes Yale political scientist Jacob Hacker, coauthor of Winner-Take-All Politics. In contrast, we're saddled with a nonproportional Senate; a tangle of state, local, and federal bureaucracies; and near-constant elections for every imaginable office (judge, sheriff, school-board member, and so on). "Nobody is competent to understand it all, which you realize every time you vote," says Michael Schudson, author of The Good Citizen. "You know you're going to come up short, and that discourages you from learning more."
It doesn't help that the United States has one of the highest levels of income inequality in the developed world, with the top 400 households raking in more money than the bottom 60 percent combined. As Dalton Conley, an NYU sociologist, explains, "it's like comparing apples and oranges. Unlike Denmark, we have a lot of very poor people without access to good education, and a huge immigrant population that doesn't even speak English." When surveys focus on well-off, native-born respondents, the U.S. actually holds its own against Europe.
Other factors exacerbate the situation. A big one, Hacker argues, is the decentralized U.S. education system, which is run mostly by individual states: "When you have more centrally managed curricula, you have more common knowledge and a stronger civic culture." Another hitch is our reliance on market-driven programming rather than public broadcasting, which, according to the EJC study, "devotes more attention to public affairs and international news, and fosters greater knowledge in these areas."
For more than two centuries, Americans have gotten away with not knowing much about the world around them. But times have changed—and they've changed in ways that make civic ignorance a big problem going forward. While isolationism is fine in an isolated society, we can no longer afford to mind our own business. What happens in China and India (or at a Japanese nuclear plant) affects the autoworker in Detroit; what happens in the statehouse and the White House affects the competition in China and India. Before the Internet, brawn was enough; now the information economy demands brains instead. And where we once relied on political institutions (like organized labor) to school the middle classes and give them leverage, we now have nothing. "The issue isn't that people in the past knew a lot more and know less now," says Hacker. "It's that their ignorance was counterbalanced by denser political organizations." The result is a society in which wired activists at either end of the spectrum dominate the debate—and lead politicians astray at precisely the wrong moment.
The current conflict over government spending illustrates the new dangers of ignorance. Every economist knows how to deal with the debt: cost-saving reforms to big-ticket entitlement programs; cuts to our bloated defe