Edwardian Promenade

From the moment African-Americans could set pen to paper, there was the black-owned newspaper. The role of the black press reached its heights in the postbellum era, as millions of the formerly enslaved black Americans hungered for a voice amidst the clamor and fuss of Reconstruction. This voice grew increasingly important as America shifted towards [...]

He had drawn out his cigarettes as he spoke, and she reached her hand toward the case.
“Oh, do give me one–I haven’t smoked for days!”
“Why such unnatural abstinence? Everybody smokes at Bellomont.”
“Yes–but it is not considered becoming in a jeune fille à marier; and at the present moment I am a jeune fille à marier.
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“Booker T. Washington, the well known negro educator and President of the Tuskegee, Ala. institute , was a guest of President Roosevelt and Mrs. Roosevelt at dinner at the white house tonight.”
It was a day like any other when the White House Social Calendar, a regular column in the newspapers of Washington D.C, inserted a [...]

There is no other expression of American democracy than the exit of one President for another. Whether the President has served one term or two–or in the case of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, four–the inauguration ceremony is one of excitement, triumph and the bittersweet. The first inauguration was held on April 30, 1789, in New York [...]

January 1 marked the 208th anniversary of the formal opening of the White House, at Washington, as the official home of the President of the United States. Having taken possession of the newly-built “President’s House” in November of 1800, President John Adams threw an official “housewarming” party for this now most historic and most important [...]

Second only to her father, Theodore Roosevelt, of this time period, no one represented Washington D.C. and the White House more than Alice. It was her antics that caused the exasperated TR to opine “I can either run the country or I can attend to Alice, but I cannot possibly do both,” and it was [...]

As “First Family,” the President, his wife and children, and any other dependents, had their needs and cares were catered to by a bevy of secretaries, secret service agents, and most important of all, domestic servants!
According to Helen Taft, “the management of the White House is a larger task than many women are ever called [...]

From the end of Reconstruction until the Great War, Washington was the center of the black aristocracy. Nowhere else in the United States possessed such a concentration of “old families,” not merely from the District and nearby Maryland and Virginia, but from throughout the country, whose emphasis on family background, good breeding, occupation, respectability, and [...]