26% Of Americans Don’t Know US Declared Independence From Great Britain

Think Progress
July 3, 2011

According to a new poll by Marist, more than a quarter of Americans couldn’t correctly identify the country from which the United States declared its independence.

While 74 percent correctly named Great Britain, 20 percent said they weren’t sure and six percent named other countries. In the South, 32 percent of respondents either responded incorrectly or weren’t sure.

The poll comes on the heels of test scores that showed few American students gaining proficiency in U.S. history, a problem presidential candidate Rick Santorum blamed on the “conscious effort” by “the left” to keep Americans uninformed.