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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Left to right: Students from L'Academie de Cuisine, Social Secretary Desiree Rogers, First Lady Michelle Obama, and White House pastry chef Bill Yosses in the White House Kitchen. February 22, 2009.
Desiree Rogers, social secretary in the Obama administration, 2008 to 2010
“[As social secretary] we have to be respectful of the time that we’re in, but at the same time be celebratory….We really did celebrate America.”
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...