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

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 below is an excerpt from the post. On October 31, 1940, just days before President Franklin Delano Roosevelt would […]

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, so after digging in The Washington Post, we were able to uncover a great story about a former slave who […]

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 Elizabeth, Winston Churchill, John Wayne and Barbara Streisand, is highly deserving of a little attention. 1. FDR and “Nothing […]

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 school in Santiago, Cuba. What’s even crazier is that the guy is STILL ALIVE! Source: U.S. National Archives

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 the 1933 London World Economic Conference): “The State Department last night refused to make a reciprocal trade agreement with […]

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 White House regarding the current beer recipe as well as a Wikipedia page. This one was published on […]

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 two years, but it was still very distant for Americans and those living in Washington. It was the thing […]

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 held in Washington at Griffith Stadium. The Senators were between mediocre and lousy by then, but this was reason […]

This is one of the greatest State of the Union speeches of all time … the one given, twelve presidents ago, by Franklin D. Roosevelt on January 6th, 1941. If you want the full text of the speech, go here.

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 ongoing privations due to the Second World War. It was a rather muted event compared to all other inaugurations. […]

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. He had just been inaugurated for a record fourth term and was guiding our country through the closing months […]