Aerial View of Franklin Roosevelt’s First Inauguration
Check out this amazing old photo of FDR’s inauguration and then compare it to this one of Eisenhower and this of Obama. Source: dullshick
Rare Footage of FDR Dedicating the NIH
This is some great old footage of FDR dedicating the NIH back in 1940. Thanks to GoDCer Jeff for sending this in a while ago. It was originally posted on an NIH blog, Circulating Now, and...
Ex-Slave Visits With FDR at White House
Watching the Oscars and thinking of 12 Years a Slave, we were wondering if and when a former slave visited the White House as a guest. I also suspect that this has happened more than once,...
Three Bits of Trivia About the Mayflower Hotel
Source: Library of Congress The “Grande Dame of Washington” has seen so much history that it’s difficult to do a post listing just three bit of trivia. Nevertheless, the building that has seen guests like Queen...
Teenage Fidel Castro’s Letter to Franklin D. Roosevelt
Wow, this one is cool. We dug it up on the National Archives’ site. This is a letter from a young Fidel Castro, at the age of 14, who was a student at Colegio de Dolores...
Franklin Roosevelt: No Marrying Foreign Aliens
For this last post, let us turn to the December 2, 1936 copy of the Washington Post. In this article, we observe a great tongue-in-cheek opening line (a nod to various failed multilateral trade initiatives, notably...
Charge of ‘Beer Orgy’ Angers White House
That’s a pretty good attention grabbing headline from the Washington Post. And I think this is appropriate, given the current media focus on the White House’s home brewed beer. There was even an official response by...
The Morning of Pearl Harbor
In Washington, late into the evening of December 6th, reporters worked their normal, likely frantic, hours and submitted their articles in time to be published the following morning. War had been raging in Europe now for...
We Want Beer! The 1937 All-Star Game at Griffith Stadium
This … picture … is … awesome. This is why I love baseball. I could almost end the post with just this picture because it’s just that amazing. The 1937 Major League Baseball All-Star Game was...
FDR’s 1941 State of the Union: Four Freedoms Speech
Later this evening, the President will give his annual State of the Union address. On such an important day, it would be remiss of me not to share one of the greatest State of the Union...
President Franklin Roosevelt’s Fourth Inauguration (1945)
Here is video (partly in color) of FDR being inaugurated for the fourth time. This being the fourth time is impressive enough, but also, this happened on the South Portico of the White House due to...
1945 Film Footage of President Roosevelt’s Funeral
April 12th, 1945 was a sad day for our nation. Our president, who had led us through the depths of the Depression and was a force for good during World War II, died at 3:35 pm....