FIRSTS 2:  Theodore Roosevelt, the 26th president, was the first sitting U.S. president to ride in an automobile, taking a public ride in a Columbia electric car in Hartford, Connecticut, on Aug. 22, 1902. While Roosevelt was the first to ride publicly as a sitting president, his predecessor, William McKinley, had privately ridden in a car earlier that year. 

It wasn’t until the 11th president that a man younger than 50 was elected to the office. James K. Polk was 49 when he won the presidential election of 1844. Unfortunately for him, Polk was also the first president to die before reaching age 60. He died of cholera only three months after leaving office.

Franklin Pierce was the first president to seek reelection and not be nominated. The 14th president’s term ended in 1857, and members of his own party, the Democrats, were not happy with him. After a period of relative calm in pre–Civil War America, Pierce’s hands-off attitude toward whether or not to expand slavery, and the violence that resulted from his Kansas-Nebraska Act, exacerbated social tensions. He sought reelection in 1856, but the Democrats nominated James Buchanan instead.

Not only was Grover Cleveland, the 22nd president, the first (and only) to marry during his presidential term, but he also got married at the White House. On June 2, 1886, he married Frances Folsom, the daughter of his former law partner, in the White House’s Blue Room.

Woodrow Wilson, 28th, is the most educated U.S. president, as he is the only one to have earned a Ph.D. He received his doctorate in History and Political Science from Johns Hopkins University in 1886 and went on to become the president of Princeton University before his presidency. 

More to come.