Helen Taft

How the Cherry Blossoms Came to Washington

Edwin S. Grosvenor | Spring 2023

Rarely has the full story been told about how a famed botanist, a pioneering female journalist, and First Lady Helen Taft battled reluctant bureaucrats to bring Japanese cherry trees to Washington.

This spring, one of the most delightful signs of rebirth after a deadly pandemic and the dreary months of winter will be the blossoming of hundreds of cherry trees along the Tidal Basin, which typically brings an estimated 1.5 million visitors to the nation’s capital.

Reassessing William Howard Taft

Jeffrey Rosen | Winter 2019

Taft is remembered for emphasizing constitutional restraint as president, but he also set aside more public lands and brought more anti-trust suits than his predecessor, Theodore Roosevelt. And he set the standard for integrity and personal conduct in the White House.

Jeffrey Rosen is a historian, law professor, and President and CEO of the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia.

Petticoat Government

Bernard A. Weisberger | October 1993

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.

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Featured Authors

Ambrose, Stephen E.

Stephen E. Ambrose (1936-2002) was a historian and professor who wrote on military history, presidential history, and American expansion and foreign policy. Ambrose has been praised for his biographies of Presidents Eisenhower and Nixon, and for helping to galvanize interest in World War II.

Atkinson, Rick

Rick Atkinson is the author of dozens of best-selling books on American military history, including The Long Gray Line, a narrative saga about the West Point class of 1966; Crusade, a narrative history of the Persian Gulf War, and In the Company of Soldiers, an account of his time with General David H. Petraeus and the 101st Airborne Division during the invasion of Iraq in 2003. He has also written a three-part narrative history of the U.S.

Bird, Kai

Kai Bird is a historian and Executive Director of Leon Levy Center for Biography at the City University of New York. He is best known for writing about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Vietnam War, US-Middle East relations and biographies of political figures. Bird is the author of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize, and The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames, a New York Times bestseller. His most recent book is The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter.

Blight, David W.

David W. Blight is the Class of 1954 Professor of American History and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance & Abolition at Yale University. Recently, Blight has written A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Narratives of Emancipation, and Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, which won the Bancroft Prize, the Abraham Lincoln Prize, and the Frederick Douglass Prize.

Brands, H. W.

H. W. Brands is a best-selling author, historian, and the Jack S. Blanton Sr. Chair at the University of Texas at Austin. He has written thirty books, including The Zealot and the Emancipator, a dual biography of the abolitionist John Brown and President Abraham Lincoln, as well as The First American and Traitor to His Class, both finalists for the Pulitzer Prize and the Los Angeles Times Prize.