Collection The Working White House
For more than two centuries, the White House has been the home of American presidents. A powerful symbol of the...
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Belle Hagner (left) at a White House garden party with an unidentified guest.
Belle Hagner, social secretary in the Theodore Roosevelt administration, 1901 to 1909, and Wilson administration, 1913 to 1915
“I would like to say that ever since this position was created for me, I have always felt very strongly that the job of secretary to the President’s wife is one which should not be solicited. I am happy to say that both times in my case, I was asked to take the place, without ever raising a finger to get it.”
For more than two centuries, the White House has been the home of American presidents. A powerful symbol of the...
For more than one hundred years, White House Social Secretaries have demonstrated a profound knowledge of protocol and society in...
For most of the 19th century, the structure of the White House staff remained generally the same. At the top...
A group of physicians and surgeons meeting in Washington 1891 was treated to a reception at the White House on the...
The whole family [of President Theodore Roosevelt] were fiends when it came to reading. No newspapers. Never a moment was...
President Andrew Jackson was a slaveholder who brought a large household of slave domestics with him from Tennessee to the...
Animals -- whether pampered household pets, working livestock, birds, squirrels, or strays -- have long been a major part of...
Thomas F. Pendel was a White House doorman from the Abraham Lincoln administration to the turn of the 20th century....
1862-1863: Mary Todd Lincoln, grieving over her son Willies death in February, began to participate in spirit circles or seances...
John Quincy Adams hired Antoine Michel Giusta as his valet after they met in Belgium in 1814. Giusta was a deserter...
White House staff who lived at the President’s House during the nineteenth century, including enslaved and free African Americans, us...
Prior to the 1939 visit of the queen and king of England, Eleanor Roosevelt received a State Department memorandum, listing various...