American History

What this category covers

The legal requirement behind the test names history first. The USCIS Policy Manual asks applicants to understand "the fundamentals of the history" of the United States, and this category is how the official list puts that into questions. It runs from the people who lived here before European settlers arrived to the military conflicts that followed the attacks of September 11, 2001. A USCIS system picks the interview questions at random and the officer asks them aloud, so any period can come up.

Most of these questions ask for one item from a longer list of accepted answers: name one war, name one reason, name one leader. That shapes how you study. One answer you can say with confidence, plus a second as backup, covers each of these questions. The exceptions are the questions with a single right answer, such as the date the Declaration of Independence was adopted or the territory bought from France, and the one question that asks for five of the original states.

History also overlaps with the government category. The Declaration of Independence appears in both, the Federalist Papers are a question about their writers here and an accepted answer about documents that influenced the Constitution there, and the amendments that widened the vote show up here as moments in time and there as rights. Studying the two side by side saves review time.

Which answers are fixed and which are not

• 6 of the 46 are on the 65/20 list, the shorter set of questions for applicants who qualify for the special consideration: 74, 78, 86, 94, 113, 115.
• None of them depends on the state where you live.
• None of them asks for the name of a current officeholder.
• 46 have their answers printed in the official list.

How to study this category

Colonial Period and Independence

Five founders get the same kind of question, "is famous for many things. Name one," each with its own list of accepted answers (question 85, question 86, question 87, question 88, question 89). The lists overlap, and that is the source of the confusion: Jefferson wrote the Declaration and Franklin helped write it; Madison and Hamilton both wrote Federalist Papers. For each person, choose an answer that belongs to nobody else, like "First Secretary of the Treasury" for Hamilton or "Father of the Constitution" for Madison, and they stop blurring together.

The question about the original states asks you to name five (question 81). Pick five you can say without hesitating, for example a run of neighbors along the coast, and repeat them in the same order every time you practice. Two other questions are easy to swap: the founding document written in 1787 is the Constitution (question 82), while July 4, 1776 is when the Declaration of Independence was adopted (question 79).

Two questions about motives sit close together and blur easily. Why the colonists came (question 73) takes answers like religious freedom, economic opportunity or escaping persecution. Why they declared independence (question 77) takes grievances against Britain: high taxes, taxation without representation, British soldiers quartered in homes, or one of the acts and events that led to the break, such as the Stamp Act or the Boston Tea Party. Keep one answer ready for each, so the two never collapse into a single vague reply.

1800s

The Civil War sits at the center of this group. It is the answer to the war between the North and the South and to the war that ended slavery (question 92, question 96), it is the setting of the question about its important events (question 93), and it is one of the accepted answers when you are asked to name a war fought in the 1800s (question 91). One well-learned fact covers several questions.

Keep the amendments after the war apart by what each one did. The 14th made citizens of people born or naturalized in the country (question 97), and the 15th is one of the accepted answers to when all men got the right to vote (question 98). The Emancipation Proclamation (question 95) freed slaves in the Confederate states, which is a different thing from the amendment that gave citizenship. For the leaders of the women's rights movement in the 1800s (question 99), Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton are both on the list.

Recent American History and Other Important Historical Information

This group covers more than a century, so lay it out as a timeline: World War I, the vote for women, the Great Depression, World War II, the Cold War with Korea and Vietnam, the civil rights movement, the Persian Gulf War, and September 11. Then look at the questions that ask why the United States entered a war (question 101, question 106, question 110, question 111, question 114). Korea and Vietnam share the same answer, to stop the spread of communism, and that link is the fastest way to remember both. Each world war has its own trigger: German attacks on U.S. ships for the first, the attack on Pearl Harbor for the second.

The Great Depression gets two questions that ask different things, what it was and when it started (question 103, question 104), and Franklin Roosevelt answers the question about who led the country through both the Depression and World War II (question 105). The last two questions in the group step outside the timeline: name an American Indian tribe and name an American innovation (question 117, question 118). Both accept a long list of answers, so choose one you can pronounce clearly in English.

Guides for this category

• A study plan for the 128 civics questions: where this category fits in the order of study.
• How the naturalization test is scored: how many correct answers you need.

Some of the civics games are built on questions from this category: Famous Americans: match the face to the answer and Put U.S. history in order. They are a quick way to drill the names and dates before a full practice test.