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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
“To undo a mistake is always harder than not to create one originally but we seldom have the foresight.”1 -First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt on Japanese Incarceration
On November 23, 1993, President Bill Clinton signed Public Law 103-150, also known as the "Apology Resolution," in the Oval Office—a rare example of bipartisan accountability for a previous wrongdoing at the highest level of government.1 The subject? America’s involvement in the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy one hundred years earlier. But to fully understand this legislation's significance, one must unde
The Secretary of Labor “quite blew our poor Undersecretary off his end of the phone.” -Diary of Jay Pierrepont Moffat, Chief of the Western European Division, U.S. Department of State1
From President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Indian Reorganization Act in 1934 to the codification of termination policy in the 1950s to President Nixon’s era of self-determination, major shifts in federal Indian policy took shape throughout the 1900s. Although Indigenous peoples are often portrayed as people of the past, by protesting, having important conversations, and holding positions of power in the Whit
For thousands of years before construction of the White House began in 1792, Native Americans, including the Nacotchtank (also referred to as the Anacostan) and Piscataway people, lived in the region that is now Washington, D.C. As the United States expanded westward throughout the 1800s, thousands of Native Americans were forced from their ancestral lands. Presidents played a significant role