Joshua Tucker: The following is a guest post from political scientists
Kyle Dropp (Dartmouth College) Joshua D. Kertzer (Harvard University)
and Thomas Zeitzoff (Princeton University).

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Since Russian troops first entered the Crimean peninsula in early March,
a series of media polling outlets have asked Americans how they want the
U.S. to respond to the ongoing situation. Although two-thirds of
Americans have reported following the situation at least “somewhat
closely,” most Americans actually know very little about events on the
ground — or even where the ground is.

On March 28-31, 2014, we asked a national sample of 2,066 Americans
(fielded via Survey Sampling International Inc. (SSI), what action they
wanted the U.S. to take in Ukraine, but with a twist: In addition to
measuring standard demographic characteristics and general foreign
policy attitudes, we also asked our survey respondents to locate Ukraine
on a map as part of a larger, ongoing project to study foreign policy
knowledge. We wanted to see where Americans think Ukraine is and to
learn if this knowledge (or lack thereof) is related to their foreign
policy views. We found that only one out of six Americans can find
Ukraine on a map, and that this lack of knowledge is related to
preferences: The farther their guesses were from Ukraine’s actual
location, the more they wanted the U.S. to intervene with military force.

Ukraine: Where is it?

Survey respondents identified Ukraine by clicking on a high-resolution
world map, shown above. We then created a distance metric by comparing
the coordinates they provided with the actual location of Ukraine on the
map. Other scholars, such as Markus Prior, have used pictures to measure
visual knowledge, but unlike many of the traditional open-ended items
political scientists use to measure knowledge, distance enables us to
measure accuracy continuously: People who believe Ukraine is in Eastern
Europe clearly are more informed than those who believe it is in Brazil
or in the Indian Ocean.

About one in six (16 percent) Americans correctly located Ukraine,
clicking somewhere within its borders. Most thought that Ukraine was
located somewhere in Europe or Asia, but the median respondent was about
1,800 miles off — roughly the distance from Chicago to Los Angeles.

http://tinyurl.com/law5ul5

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My guess is that if you gave Americans an outline map of the "Lower 48"
states in the U.S.A., and asked them to write in the names of the
states, the percentage getting all of them correct would be -maybe- 25%.

"Where's the Ukraine?" "Oh, somewhere near the Yukon, right?"