US Presidents in Order Flash Cards

About this deck

Every presidency in order, Washington through the present — one card per number, with the president's name and years in office on the back. Drill them in sequence the first time; once the order starts to hold, the misses the deck re-queues will cluster in the famously forgettable stretches.

Two quirks of the list are worth knowing before you start. Grover Cleveland served two non-consecutive terms, so he's both the 22nd and the 24th president — two cards, one man, and the reason the count of presidencies runs one higher than the count of people. Donald Trump repeated the pattern more recently as the 45th and 47th. And the mid-1800s run from Tyler through Buchanan is where nearly everyone's memory goes soft; expect those cards to come back around a few times.

A trick that helps: chunk the list into eras instead of memorizing 47 loose facts — founders (1–7), the pre-Civil War drift (8–15), war and reconstruction (16–19), the Gilded Age (20–25), and so on through the modern presidents you already know. The numbers inside each chunk are much easier to pin down once the chunks themselves are solid.