As the crowds pour into the nation's capital this weekend to enjoy the July 4 national holiday, a new poll shows that not every American knows exactly what they're celebrating.
When asked which country the United States declared independence from by the polling group Marist, one-quarter of Americans could not answer correctly (here's a hint - the answer isn't China.)
Those living in the Northeast can hold their heads high - 4 out of 5 got the answer right, beating the national average according to the poll. Marist said residents in the South gave the most wrong answers.
But that wasn't the only point of American history that Americans are confused about. A whopping 42 percent of those polled either did not know or were not sure what year the U.S. declared its independence. The Northeast region was best at answering that fairly important piece of trivia, and again, the South was the worst.
The poll also shows that Americans' ignorance on their own history is a generational issue. Marist said that only 31 percent of adults under the age of 30 knew the year of independence with certainty.
