Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
First Ladies
Her son had her committed. She said it was so he could get his hands on her money. Now, 130 years after this bitter and controversial drama, a trove of letters—long believed destroyed—sheds new light on it.
An Interview With the President and the First Lady
I was a writer on the staff of the Hunter College newspaper when Eleanor Roosevelt, completely alone, would stop by looking for someone to talk to.
The Roosevelt townhouse was only three blocks from Hunter College’s main building at Park Avenue at Sixty-eighth Street, and one day in 1940 Eleanor just walked in off the street. The door she opened was the entrance to Echo, the college magazine. Read more >>
An Interview with the President and the First Lady
On a busy Wednesday morning last August, President and Mrs. Clinton found an hour to speak with me in the Oval Office of the White House. Read more >>
First Ladies have been under fire ever since Albert Gallatin called Abigail Adams “Mrs. President”
I am informed that whenever Rush Limbaugh has cause to mention Hillary Rodham Clinton, he cues in “Hail to the Chief” as background music. There’s nothing like subtlety. Read more >>
Long-overlooked White House “Social Files” are revealing just how much power Presidents’ wives have had.
Well, sentiments change,” said Lady Bird Johnson. She was speaking of the years when Americans would no longer support President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Vietnam policies. Read more >>
The ground rules have changed drastically since 1789. Abigail Adams, stifled in her time, would have loved being First Lady today.
ONCE AGAIN the candidates gear up for a national election; not only the candidates but their wives too. And pity the ladies! Read more >>
The former First Lady looks back on the years with Lyndon and discusses her life today
When Lady Bird Johnson stops by the post office in Stonewall, Texas, to mail a letter, or waves to the tourists visiting the Johnson Ranch, or rides in the elevator of the LBJ Library in Austin, she is greeted with delighted smiles—sometimes of immediate reco Read more >>
Wilson's letters to Mary were frequent and intimate, but it would have been political suicide to marry a divorcee by the post-Victorian standards of the time
On the afternoon of September 18, 1915, Woodrow Wilson, President of the United States and a widower, wrote a brief note that he knew might change the rest of his life. The note, sent by messenger, was for Edith Boiling Galt, to whom he was secretly engaged. Read more >>
Eleanor Roosevelt thought the "young man from Massachusetts" was a fine senator, but too inexperienced to be President.
She was the most powerful woman in America, if not the world. He was the junior senator from the state of Massachusetts. She wanted no position or favor, only to extend her already enormous influence, something she professed not to have. Read more >>
The courtship and fifty-four-year marriage of John and Abigail Adams was, despite separation and war and tragedy, a moving and highly literate love feast between two "Dearest Friends"
On a cool Massachusetts morning in April, 1764, a girl named Abigail Smith watched anxiously as a servant held a bundle of letters in a fire tongs over a smouldering flame. “Did you never rob a Birds nest?” she wrote her correspondent. Read more >>
In her later years, Dolley was urbane and gracious, but ruined financially by her spendthrift son.
Because the first daguerreotype in this country was made in 1839, it is nearly impossible to bridge, through photography, the gulf that separates us from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Read more >>
Eighteenth-century equivalents of “Yankee go home!” greeted the Adams family when, in 1785, they arrived in London. Nevertheless, there were certain delightful compensations—especially for an eligible young lady