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Article
The White House Collection: Reminders of 1814
When the President’s House was consumed by fire in 1814, furnishings purchased over twenty-five years by the United States government for Presidents George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison were lost. Among them were the eighteenth-century objects from the two residences occupied by President Washington in New York in 1789 and 1790 and from the Philadelphia home in wh
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Article
The White House Collection: The Truman Interiors
On March 27, 1952, President and Mrs. Truman returned to a freshly renovated White House after living at Blair House since November 1948. They were delighted with the success of the three-and-one- half-year project in spite of all its problems and disruptions. A week later they welcomed their first house guests, Queen Juliana and Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, and on April 22 the
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Article
The White House Collection: George Washington
“It is of very great importance to fix the taste of our Country properly, and I think your Example will go so far in that respect. It is therefore my Wish that every Thing about you should be substantially good and majestically plain; made to endure” wrote Gouverneur Morris, the American businessman and diplomat in Paris, to President George Washington in 1
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Article
The White House Collection: The Beaux Arts Furnishing of 1902
One of the principal goals that governed the architectural changes made to the White House in 1902 by McKim, Mead & White—to refurnish the interior of the building in harmony with its exterior architecture—was adhered to in furnishing the State Rooms. The eclecticism of the variety of forms and styles of furniture and other decorative objects designed and made for
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Article
The White House Collection Research Sources in the Office of the Curator
A house more thoroughly documented than the White House is difficult to imagine. Historians and students of White House history seeking primary source materials on the late-18th-century origin, design, and construction of the building as well as its 19th-century reconstruction and renovations, changing interior spaces, and purchases of art and furnishings, must turn to the rich resources of the
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Bio
Sarah Yorke Jackson
Sarah Yorke was born ca. 1803/05 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to parents Peter and Mary.1 Relatives raised Sarah after she was orphaned as a child.2 She married Andrew Jackson Jr., the adopted son of President Andrew Jackson, in 1831.3 Sarah lived at Jackson’s plantation, The Hermitage, and oversaw the operation of the household and the enslaved laborers there, during his presidency. She an
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Bio
Abraham Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln warned the South in his first Inaugural Address, “In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The government will not assail you....You have no oath registered in Heaven to destroy the government, while I shall have the most solemn one to ‘preserve, protect and defend’ it.” Lincoln consider
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Bio
Michelle Obama
Michelle Robinson was born in Chicago, Illinois on January 17, 1964. Her father, Fraser, was a pump operator, and her mother, Marian, raised Michelle and her brother Craig at home.1 After graduating from public school, Michelle earned her B.A. in sociology from Princeton University in 1985 and then attended Harvard Law School, receiving her Juris Doctor three years later. Michelle then returned
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Bio
Barack Obama
When Barack Obama was elected president in 2008, he became the first African American to hold the office. Obama faced major challenges during his two-term tenure in office. His primary policy achievements included health care reform, economic stimulus, banking reform and consumer protections, and a repeal of the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy preventing lesbian and gay Americans from serving
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Bio
Mamie Eisenhower
Mamie Geneva Doud was born on November 14, 1896, in Boone, Iowa. She was the daughter of John Sheldon Doud and Elivera Mathilda Carlson Doud. The Doud family later moved to Colorado, eventually settling in Denver. Mamie attended local public schools and graduated from the Wolcott School, a private school for girls in 1915. That fall she met Second Lieutenant Dwight D. Eisenhower,
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Bio
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Assuming the presidency during the Great Depression, Franklin D. Roosevelt helped the American people regain faith in themselves. He brought hope as he promised prompt, vigorous action, and asserted in his first Inaugural Address that "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself."Born on January 30, 1882 at Hyde Park, New York, he attended Harvard University and Columbia Law
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Bio
Franklin Pierce
Franklin Pierce became president at a time of what seemed on the surface like domestic tranquility. The United States, by virtue of the Compromise of 1850, seemed to have weathered its sectional storm. By following the recommendations of southern advisers, Pierce—a New Englander— hoped to prevent another outbreak of that storm. But his policies, far from preserving calm, hastened the disr