PRESIDENT 1
George Washington
1789–1797 · Founding Era
He was asked to become king and said no — a decision so unusual in the history of military victors that people are still talking about it.
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American Presidents in Order
Explore the full sequence of American presidents in order, from George Washington to the present day. Switch between a structured era view and a scrollable timeline.
PRESIDENT 2
John Adams
1797–1801 · Founding Era
He spent his presidency being compared unfavourably to Washington, lost to Jefferson in a bitter re-election campaign, and had to wait until he was dead for history to decide he'd been right about more than people admitted.
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PRESIDENT 3
Thomas Jefferson
1801–1809 · Founding Era
He wrote that all men are created equal, owned more than six hundred enslaved people, and spent his life writing about liberty — a contradiction the country has never fully resolved.
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PRESIDENT 4
James Madison
1809–1817 · Early Republic
He helped design a government capable of limiting its own power, then faced a war that burned its capital to the ground and tested whether any of it had worked.
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PRESIDENT 5
James Monroe
1817–1825 · Early Republic
He ran for re-election without opposition, presided over what newspapers called the Era of Good Feelings, and issued a doctrine that quietly shaped American foreign policy for two centuries.
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PRESIDENT 6
John Quincy Adams
1825–1829 · Early Republic
He won the presidency despite getting fewer votes than his main opponent, served one bruising term, lost badly, and then returned to Congress for seventeen more years — the most productive of his career.
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PRESIDENT 7
Andrew Jackson
1829–1837 · Jacksonian Era
He survived duels, a knife wound, and two bullets lodged in his chest — then ran the country with the same approach he'd used to win fights.
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PRESIDENT 8
Martin Van Buren
1837–1841 · Jacksonian Era
He engineered Andrew Jackson's rise to power, became president himself, inherited the financial crash that followed Jackson's policies, and lost his re-election campaign to a man whose main qualification was being a war hero.
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PRESIDENT 9
William Henry Harrison
1841 · Antebellum Era
He gave the longest inaugural address in presidential history in freezing weather without a hat or coat, caught pneumonia, and died thirty-one days later.
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PRESIDENT 10
John Tyler
1841–1845 · Antebellum Era
He became president when Harrison died after a month, was promptly expelled from his own party, governed without one, and still managed to deliver Texas to the United States.
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PRESIDENT 11
James K Polk
1845–1849 · Antebellum Era
He came to office with a list of four specific goals, achieved all four in a single term, and left — one of the few presidents who did exactly what he said he would.
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PRESIDENT 12
Zachary Taylor
1849–1850 · Antebellum Era
He spent his career fighting wars and actively avoided politics until he was sixty-four — then agreed to run for president, won, and died sixteen months later.
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PRESIDENT 13
Millard Fillmore
1850–1853 · Antebellum Era
He signed the Compromise of 1850 hoping to settle the slavery question for a generation, and instead bought the country a decade to prepare for a war it couldn't avoid.
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PRESIDENT 14
Franklin Pierce
1853–1857 · Antebellum Era
He was a personally popular man whose presidency accelerated the collapse of national compromise over slavery — a reminder that charm and catastrophic judgment often coexist.
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PRESIDENT 15
James Buchanan
1857–1861 · Antebellum Era
He watched the United States lurch toward civil war during his four years in office and seems to have concluded, repeatedly, that not acting was the safest option.
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PRESIDENT 16
Abraham Lincoln
1861–1865 · Civil War & Reconstruction
He held a fractured country together through its bloodiest war — and was shot five days after the fighting stopped.
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PRESIDENT 17
Andrew Johnson
1865–1869 · Civil War & Reconstruction
He took office after Lincoln's assassination with a plan for reuniting the country, and promptly became the first president to be impeached.
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PRESIDENT 18
Ulysses S. Grant
1869–1877 · Civil War & Reconstruction
He was a failure at nearly everything before the Civil War, became the general who won it, served two terms as president, went bankrupt, and spent his dying days writing his memoirs to leave money for his family.
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PRESIDENT 19
Rutherford B Hayes
1877–1881 · Gilded Age
He won the most disputed presidential election in American history by a single electoral vote, withdrew federal troops from the South, and effectively ended Reconstruction.
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PRESIDENT 20
James A Garfield
1881 · Gilded Age
He was shot by a disappointed civil servant two months into his presidency and survived the bullet — but not the infection caused by the doctors who tried to save him.
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PRESIDENT 21
Chester A. Arthur
1881–1885 · Gilded Age
He reached the presidency through machine politics and promptly turned against the machine, championing the civil service reform that dismantled the very system that made him.
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PRESIDENT 22
Grover Cleveland
1885–1889 · Gilded Age
He won the presidency, lost it, and won it again four years later — the only president ever to serve two non-consecutive terms until the twenty-first century.
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PRESIDENT 23
Benjamin Harrison
1889–1893 · Gilded Age
He won the presidency with fewer votes than his opponent, served a single quiet term, then lost to the same man four years later.
View profilePRESIDENT 24
Grover Cleveland
1893–1897 · Gilded Age
He won the presidency, lost it, and won it again four years later — the only president ever to serve two non-consecutive terms until the twenty-first century.
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PRESIDENT 25
William McKinley
1897–1901 · Progressive Era
He won the presidency twice, led the United States into an imperial war, and was shot by an anarchist at a public handshake line he'd been warned not to attend.
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PRESIDENT 26
Theodore Roosevelt
1901–1909 · Progressive Era
He became president at forty-two after an assassination, hunted big game, built the Panama Canal, and won a Nobel Peace Prize — all within seven years.
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PRESIDENT 27
William Howard Taft
1909–1913 · Progressive Era
He hated being president, loved being a judge, and eventually became Chief Justice of the Supreme Court — which he considered the better job by far.
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PRESIDENT 28
Woodrow Wilson
1913–1921 · World War I
He proposed the League of Nations to prevent another world war, won the Nobel Peace Prize for doing so, and then watched the United States Senate refuse to join it.
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PRESIDENT 29
Warren G. Harding
1921–1923 · Interwar Era
He was one of the most popular presidents in American history while alive and one of the most mocked after death — when the scale of his administration's corruption became clear.
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PRESIDENT 30
Calvin Coolidge
1923–1929 · Interwar Era
He believed the business of America was business, presided over the boom years of the 1920s, and quietly stepped aside before the crash came.
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PRESIDENT 31
Herbert Hoover
1929–1933 · Great Depression
He was one of the most admired men in America before the Depression and one of the most blamed during it — a reminder that timing is everything in politics.
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PRESIDENT 32
Franklin D. Roosevelt
1933–1945 · Great Depression & WWII
He was paralysed from the waist down, ran for president four times, won four times, and governed through the Depression and a world war without anyone outside his inner circle fully knowing the extent of his condition.
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PRESIDENT 33
Harry S Truman
1945–1953 · Early Cold War
He became president when Roosevelt died, was not told about the atomic bomb until after the ceremony, and within months had used it twice.
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PRESIDENT 34
Dwight D. Eisenhower
1953–1961 · Early Cold War
He planned the largest military operation in history, became president on the strength of it, then warned in his farewell address that the military machine he'd helped build was becoming a threat.
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PRESIDENT 35
John F Kennedy
1961–1963 · Cold War
He served just over a thousand days as president, and sixty years later the arguments about what he would have done with the rest of his term show no sign of ending.
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PRESIDENT 36
Lyndon B Johnson
1963–1969 · Cold War
He passed the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, and Medicare — more transformative legislation than almost any president — then watched Vietnam consume everything.
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PRESIDENT 37
Richard Nixon
1969–1974 · Cold War
He opened China, ended the draft, founded the EPA — and then recorded himself discussing how to cover up a break-in and handed his enemies the evidence they needed.
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PRESIDENT 38
Gerald Ford
1974–1977 · Cold War
He was never elected president or vice president, reached both offices through appointment, and spent his single term trying to rebuild a government the public had stopped trusting.
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PRESIDENT 39
Jimmy Carter
1977–1981 · Cold War
He left the White House widely considered a failed president and spent the next four decades building houses for the poor, monitoring elections, and eradicating diseases — quietly becoming one of the most admired men alive.
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PRESIDENT 40
Ronald Reagan
1981–1989 · Late Cold War
He was a B-movie actor who became the most consequential American president of the late twentieth century — and the argument about how he managed it has never stopped.
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PRESIDENT 41
George H. W. Bush
1989–1993 · End of Cold War
He oversaw the end of the Cold War, assembled a global coalition to win a war in the Gulf, and then lost his re-election campaign to a man from a small town in Arkansas.
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PRESIDENT 42
Bill Clinton
1993–2001 · Post-Cold War
He governed through a decade of prosperity, survived impeachment, and left office with the highest approval ratings of any departing president — and the most complicated legacy.
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PRESIDENT 43
George W. Bush
2001–2009 · War on Terror
He came to office promising a humble foreign policy, then responded to the worst attack on American soil in history with two wars that are still unresolved decades later.
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PRESIDENT 44
Barack Obama
2009–2017 · 21st Century
He ran for president two years into his first Senate term, won on a message of hope, and spent eight years discovering what hope costs in practice.
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PRESIDENT 45
Donald Trump
2017–2021 · 21st Century
He ran for president as an outsider, won against expectations, lost the next election, ran again, and won — making him the first American president to serve two non-consecutive terms since the nineteenth century.
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PRESIDENT 46
Joe Biden
2021–2025 · 21st Century
He ran for president three times across forty years, lost twice, and won the third time at the age of seventy-seven.
View profilePRESIDENT 47
Donald Trump
2025–present · 21st Century
He ran for president as an outsider, won against expectations, lost the next election, ran again, and won — making him the first American president to serve two non-consecutive terms since the nineteenth century.
View profileFrequently asked questions
Who was the first president of the United States?
George Washington was the first president of the United States, serving from 1789 to 1797 and setting many of the early expectations for the office.
Why are Grover Cleveland and Donald Trump counted twice?
Both men served non-consecutive terms, so they appear twice in the numbered sequence of presidencies. That is why the total number of presidencies is higher than the number of individual people who have held the office.