Collection Giving Thanks at the White House
Thanksgiving is a relatively quiet and personal holiday at the White House, as it precedes a very busy season of...
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Have you ever wondered...
The tradition of “pardoning” White House turkeys has been traced to President Abraham Lincoln's 1863 clemency to a turkey recorded in an 1865 dispatch by White House reporter Noah Brooks, who noted, “a live turkey had been brought home for the Christmas dinner, but [Lincoln’s son Tad] interceded in behalf of its life. . . . [Tad’s] plea was admitted and the turkey’s life spared.”
Recently White House mythmakers have claimed that President Harry S. Truman began this amusing holiday tradition. However, Truman, when he received the turkeys, and subsequent presidents did not “pardon” their birds. The formalities of pardoning a turkey gelled by 1989, when President George H.W. Bush remarked, “Reprieve,” “keep him going,” or “pardon”: it’s all the same for the turkey, as long as he doesn’t end up on the president’s holiday table.
Thanksgiving is a relatively quiet and personal holiday at the White House, as it precedes a very busy season of...
Today, the celebration of Halloween conjures images of costumed trick-or-treaters, sweets, and jack-o'-lanterns; but there was a time when All...
President Harry S. Truman was close to his friends and associates, had a grin for strangers, but could be less...
Every year since 1981, the White House Historical Association has had the privilege of designing the Official White House Christmas Ornament....
Biographies & Portraits
As a girlhood companion remembered her, Mary Todd was vivacious and impulsive, but "she now and then could not restrain...
Abraham Lincoln warned the South in his Inaugural Address, "In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not in mine,...
When Barack Obama was elected president in 2008, he became the first African American to hold the office. The framers of t...
Rarely has a first lady been greeted by the American people and the press with the approbation and warmth accorded...
George H.W. Bush brought to the White House a wish for Americans to be “points of light.” He created Poin...
Whistle-stopping in 1948, President Truman often ended his talk by introducing his wife as "the Boss" and his daughter, Margaret, as "...
Tall, stiffly formal in the high stock he wore around his jowls, James Buchanan was the only president who never...