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A State Dinner honoring a visiting head of government or reigning monarch is one of the grandest and most glamorous of White House affairs. It is part of an official State Visit and provides the president and first lady the opportunity to honor the visiting head of state and his or her spouse. In this collection, explore the history of
On April 2, 1814 British Admiral Sir Alexander Cochrane issued a proclamation stating that "all persons who may be disposed" to escape to and seek refuge on a British warship would receive their freedom and land in a British colony. In response, an estimated 3,400 enslaved people in Chesapeake coastal areas welcomed the invading British troops as emancipators and ran away from slavery
President Franklin D. Roosevelt called Sunday, December 7, 1941, a day that would "live in infamy," for on that day the Empire of Japan launched a surprise attack against the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor. Within a day the United States was at war with Japan, and only three days later with Japan's Axis allies, Germany and Italy. Great Britain,
THE GREAT CAUSE OF UNIONOn Election Day, Abraham Lincoln had walked down to the courthouse in Springfield, Illinois, parting a crowd of supporters who had come to see him cast his vote. He did not think he should vote for himself, but otherwise checked off a straight Republican ticket. By midnight, through the benefits of the telegraph, he knew he
In that week before Thanksgiving, President John F. Kennedy and his wife Jacqueline traveled to Texas. The trip was political–Kennedy was unsure of his support in this southern state. In the previous two years, very little Texas money had come into the coffers of the Democratic National Committee, and more and more Texas voters who opposed Kennedy’s civil righ
The 13th Congress returned for its third session on September 19, 1814, four weeks after the burning of Washington and met at the three-story Blodgett's Hotel (home of the Patent and Post Offices) at 8th and E Streets. Congress's full plate of issues—especially the nation's precarious financial situation—included the question of whether or not to move the capital from Washington. To s
By nightfall on August 24, 1814, British forces had arrived on Capitol Hill and broken through the doors of the 14-year-old Capitol, initially designed by Dr. William Thornton with major interior improvements by Benjamin Henry Latrobe. The Capitol in 1814 was still a work in progress, as only the Senate and House of Representative wings had been completed. A temporary covered wooden walkway
At the time, John F. Kennedy was serving as a United States senator from Massachusetts, and the events that were about to unfold would require the thinking and leadership of the nation’s president, Dwight D. Eisenhower. Yet the effects of those events would eventually come to bear on the presidency of John Kennedy. It started with the launching of Sp
Timeline of Events (Year 1814):May 9: News of Napoleon's abdication reached Washington.May 10-19: U.S. forces under Lt. Col. John B. Campbell captured and burned Port Dover and Port Talbot, Upper Canada (Ontario)—an outrage that contributed to the British decision to burn the public buildings of Washington, D.C.May 20: President James Madison tried to prod Secretary of War Jo
In late May 1814, Commodore Joshua Barney, the veteran leader of the U.S. flotilla in the upper Chesapeake, left his base in Baltimore and established a new base of operations on the Patuxent River. His flotilla was small—consisting of a sloop, barges, gunboats, a galley, a lookout boat and his flagship, the cutter Scorpion—but at the moment it was