Yesterday, First Lady Michelle Obama delivered the keynote speech at the 2012 Democratic National Convention, set to nominate her husband President Barack Obama for a second term. Stirring, emotional yet tacked by details of her own life and her husband’s… Read More ›
I did not know Gore Vidal well, but I’d read some of his books, and he’d read some of mine. We met three times: once at the National Press Club in Washington, a second time at the White House, and… Read More ›
Reaction to the comment made last week by Ann Romney about what she meant by using the words “you people,” are much like the reaction four years ago to the one made by Michelle Obama about feeling “proud for the first… Read More ›
Despite her being born forty-five years before Jacqueline Kennedy, there is a similar pattern in the story of Eleanor Roosevelt‘s Irish immigrant heritage. It illustrates less the shame of humble origin than how the power of incredible wealth can lead people… Read More ›
This article is part of an ongoing series about the racial, religious and ethnic identity of First Ladies, beginning with the recent discoveries about First Lady Michelle Obama and her ancestry from both an Irish immigrant family of Georgia slave-owners… Read More ›
The recent news, emerging from the new book American Tapestry: The Story of the Black, White, and Multiracial Ancestors of Michelle Obama, by New York Times reporter Rachel L. Swarns, finally provides in a detailed history how the First Lady‘s… Read More ›
It had been forty-four years since a First Lady had given much attention to the White House grounds and significantly re-landscaped them when Michelle Obama broke ground for what has become, in the four years since, her White House Kitchen… Read More ›
Loved and loathed, flowers and colors named for them, parodied on Saturday Night Live skits and Halloween masks, First Ladies are woven into the fabric of American Pop Culture. And, First Ladies have had songs written about them, being set… Read More ›
They were both unapologetically liberal Yankee aristocrats who used their cigarettes like theatrical props and delivered their crisp, taut opinions in the now-vanished “Mid-Atlantic accent,” that American upper-class tone popularly called “Locust Valley Lockjaw.” They were even distantly related through… Read More ›
By 2005, Dorothy Rodham didn’t need to walk to the National Zoo alone. After all, her son-in-law had been President and her daughter was then a United States Senator and an aide or companion could easily have been hired. The… Read More ›
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