Fun Facts -- Fun Facts About the United States

By Denise Miller Holmes

Did you know that the word “independence”

does not appear in the body of the DOI even once!

Friends for life, sort of
Thomas Jefferson and John Adams were best friends…almost for life. When they were working together in the colonial congress, they were best friends. But when John Adams became POTUS (President of the U. S.), they stopped speaking even though Jefferson was Vice President. Many years after Adams’s presidency, a mutual friend got the two founders back together and they became close once more. They both died on the same day—July 4, 1826.

Who wrote the DOI?
Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence. It was John Quincy Adams who chose him to be the author. There was a committee (that included Adams and Jefferson) who decided the major concepts of the document, but it was Jefferson who made it cohesive and lent it his artful prose. I bet he had a Snickers candy bar after he was finished—truly hard work!

The United States is a country, and so much more
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic. It covers 3.79 million square miles of dirt. Some say it’s pretty dirt, with amber waves of grain and all that. I happen to agree. =)

Where am I?
When Christopher Columbus hit the islands off the east coast of what we now call “the United States of America,” the ill-informed explorer thought he’d hit the sub-continent of India, which is why he called the natives “Indians.” Funny thing is, at his death several years later, he still believed the same thing. Don’t you think he should have figured it out by then?

Different than we thought
Most of us believe that the Declaration of Independence was signed by all the signatories on July 4, 1776. Truth is, only Thomas Jefferson and Charles Thompson signed it on that date, with the rest signing it in drips and drabs for another month.