1929: Herbert Hoover was the first president to have a telephone installed on his desk on March 27. A fire on Christmas Eve 1929 gutted the executive office building and a reconstruction began immediately.
1979: Islamic militants stormed the United States Embassy in Tehran, Iran, and took Americans hostage. The West Wing once again became a crisis center as President Jimmy Carter and his staff planned a response.
When Franklin D. Roosevelt became president, the modern period of president-press relations began. FDR held long and informal press conferences in the Oval Office and began the tradition of an annual press reception modeled after state diplomatic events. FDR was the first president to fully exploit radio as a force to promote his programs and policy. On March 6, 1933, First Lady
Ronald Reagan preferred to present himself and his policies in venues other than a formal presidential press conference. He held about six conferences a year and usually staged them in the East Room at night. George H. W. Bush made frequent use of press conferences in the Press Briefing Room during his first three years in office, holding on average
An issue about the White House and the West naturally draws one’s attention to the expansionism experienced during Jefferson’s administration. While the glow of new, cheap land way out there somewhere reverberated in the average citizen’s mind, natural curiosity made him or her wonder also what the West was like. People knew it was different, and might have s
On August 24, 1814, British forces marched into Washington, D.C. and set fire to the White House, the Capitol, and other government buildings. After the British left the city, the government hired James Hoban, designer of the original President's House, to supervise the rebuilding of the mansion and executive office buildings, while Benjamin H. Latrobe returned as Architect of the Capitol.
During the 1850s Japan gradually began to discard its isolationist foreign policy of sakoku (“locked country”) and began opening some of its ports to foreign trade while accepting diplomatic recognition from western nations. The U.S. and Japan signed a Treaty of Amity and Commerce in July 1858, and in February 1860 three samurai ambassadors and their entourage of 74 took a U.S. N
President Grover Cleveland was ill-prepared for the American sovereigns’ (as he referred to the public) fascination with his soon-to-be-bride when he formally announced their upcoming nuptials on May 28, 1886. In an era in which people obtained their news in print, occasionally with the aid of an artist’s sketch, word traveled rapidly about the unusual beauty of Frances Folsom, Cleveland’s 21-year-
The new British minister to the United States was outraged. Within a few weeks of Minister Anthony Merry’s arrival in Washington, he was reporting to his foreign office in London what he perceived as breaches of diplomatic protocol, and topping his list of grievances were complaints regarding President Thomas Jefferson’s appearance. Merry had accompanied Secretary of State James Madi
Dolley Madison died at her house on Lafayette Square on July 12, 1849. She was eighty-one. By that age she was one of the few women of note who remembered the founding fathers personally. There were others, most of them women like Mrs. Madison who had outlived their husbands. Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton, widow of Alexander Hamilton was older and lived just up