Collection The White House Social Secretary
For more than one hundred years, White House Social Secretaries have demonstrated a profound knowledge of protocol and society in...
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Thomas F. Pendel was a White House doorman from the Abraham Lincoln administration to the turn of the 20th century. By the time Chester A. Arthur succeeded James A. Garfield in September 1881, Pendel had experienced the assassinations of both Lincoln and Garfield.
This portrait of Thomas F. Pendel appeared in his 1902 memoir, Thirty-six Years in the White House
For more than one hundred years, White House Social Secretaries have demonstrated a profound knowledge of protocol and society in...
For more than two centuries, the White House has been the home of American presidents. A powerful symbol of the...
White House staff who lived at the President’s House during the nineteenth century, including enslaved and free African Americans, us...
1862-1863: Mary Todd Lincoln, grieving over her son Willies death in February, began to participate in spirit circles or seances...
Animals -- whether pampered household pets, working livestock, birds, squirrels, or strays -- have long been a major part of...
"Largely through television," notes historian William Seale, the White House "is the best known house in the world, the instantly...
Thomas F. Pendel was a White House doorman from the Abraham Lincoln administration to the turn of the 20th century....
Prior to the 1939 visit of the queen and king of England, Eleanor Roosevelt received a State Department memorandum, listing various...
A group of physicians and surgeons meeting in Washington 1891 was treated to a reception at the White House on the...
President Andrew Jackson was a slaveholder who brought a large household of slave domestics with him from Tennessee to the...
For most of the 19th century, the structure of the White House staff remained generally the same. At the top...
John Quincy Adams hired Antoine Michel Giusta as his valet after they met in Belgium in 1814. Giusta was a deserter...