Cite?
No way. I looked at a US map and there is still no way. Could you have meant Philadelphia?
ETA: I stand corrected. You are right. Wow.
I just ate two footlong subs.
No. Knowing the “basic geography” of the United States will not lead you to the insight that Pittsburgh is farther east than Miami. To know that, you have to know that the Atlantic coast bends eastward more than enough to offset the separation between Pittsburgh and the coast. There is nothing basic about this knowledge.
Most maps of the United States are projected from a central meridian near the middle of the country, which causes the Northeast to be canted leftward. This is why the eastern-ness of Pittsburgh (and all the Northeast) will surprise most people.
I guess what I meant is that either it’s a matter of knowing the basic geography (like the fact that most of North Dakota lies north of most of Maine), or it’s really, really trivial, like this one. (Ok, I didn’t know P-Burgh was East of Miami, but it’s not really far east of it, and I did know some of PA was, so it didn’t surprise me.) I stand by my opinion that these type of “did you know X was n/s/e/w of Y” factoids are usually devoid of whatever makes good trivia good.
So as not to be a thread-leach: Did you know that in England, they also walk on the left side of the street? Sure, it makes sense, but it took me a good 5 minutes to figure out why walking through the crowded train station we got out of felt like swimming through molasses (oh! they walk on the other side too!) I mean, we were city folk, so it was baffling as to why we kept stumbling into people.
Note also that under the Maritime Law rule of “general average” (also known as the York-Antwerp Rules) the owners of the ship and of any other cargo on board can be required to compensate the owner of the goods which were thrown overboard as jetsam to save the ship and the remaining cargo.
Andrew Johnson, David G. Farragut, George H. Thomas and Sam Houston were all Southerners who remained loyal to the Union during the Civil War.
Abraham Lincoln once said that he liked a preacher “who looks like he’s fighting bees.”
Charles Darwin married his first cousin, which was not terribly unusual at the time.
FDR and Churchill were both irritated by Charles de Gaulle.
Hitler met with Francisco Franco just once, for the better part of a day, after which the German leader told an aide, “Next time I’d rather just have a tooth extracted.”
An Army officer offered to get Truman a hooker when he visited Berlin in 1945; the President curtly declined.
Margaret Mitchell, author of Gone with the Wind, died after being hit by a cab.
Mark Twain was instrumental in seeing that the nearly-destitute Ulysses S. Grant got a great book deal for his autobiography, which Grant finished just days before his death.
During the Cold War, British prime ministers wrote secret letters, to be opened only in the event of nuclear war, for the captains of the Royal Navy’s missile-armed submarines.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle considered “Sherrinford” as a possible first name for his Baker Street detective.
In early drafts of The Lord of The Rings, Aragorn’s character was a hobbit on stilts named “Trotter”.
The last King of England to be murdered was arguably King George V.
In order for his death to be annouced in the morning papers (rather than risk the ignominy of it appearing first in the evening editions) the King’s private physician gave the already ailing monarch a heavy late-night dose of morphine and cocaine to hasten his end.
Guess you’re too young to have ever seen any of his stand-up or heard any of his wildly popular comedy albums.
Reminds me of my favorite, fun, more famous, historical LotR fact: the early name for Celeborn was “Teleporno”.
Then you’re wrong- you were hungry. Now you’re full.
Is this a whoosh? I’ve lived my entire life in England without noticing this supposed rule.
The oldest city in the USA, besides all those the Indians built, is not Jacksonville, Florida. Its Pensacola, Florida.
After Pensacola was founded, it was promptly destroyed by a major hurricane. By the time it was rebuilt, Jacksonville had already been founded.
cite? I’m willing to give you the benefit of the doubt, but (a) it makes no sense that the first settlement would have been on the panhandle on the Gulf of Mexico rather than on the Atlantic coast and (b) you got the supposed fallacy wrong. I’ve never seen anyone say “Jacksonville” was the oldest settlement. St. Augustine, OTOH, is the official oldest settlement, established in 1565.
It’s true. Pensacola was founded in 1559, then abandoned in 1561 due to hurricane damage. It was resettled in 1696.
St. Augustine is the oldest continuously inhabited European settlement on the US mainland, but not the oldest settlement.
Your right, I misremembered it as Jacksonville because its near St Augustine (just another one of those big east coast florida cities in my mind 
Explorers dont just stop at the first place they come to you know. They wander and wander and wander until they start getting tired of wanders and then look for a good place to stop.
Pensacola was were they stopped because it was a good place to stop, not the the first place they could. Besides the hurricanes that is. This area is, historically speaking, pretty much the place in the US that gets hit with the most hurricanes.
Something we don’t know, Ludovic, something we don’t know. 
I shit you not.
First, it’s not a hard-and-fast rule, but more of a trend: in the US, when people approach each other on the sidewalk or in a crowded train station, everyone breaks to the right. In England, to the left. I didn’t notice this rule in the US for a long time, but there it was: Most people were subconsciously breaking to the right.
Maybe we wouldn’t have noticed the difference, except that our first walking experience outside of the Manchester airport was the Birmingham rail station. It was very obvious there. As tourists, we were spending lots of times in crowded city centres and rail stations, so maybe this was why it was so noticeable to us.
Take a walk in Manhattan, and tell me you don’t see it.
Take a look at any Mall in the USA. People tend to walk on the right side as they shop.