Prologue: Pieces of History

Today’s blog post was written by Sam Rushay, a supervisory archivist at the Truman Presidential Library. In the late summer of 1945, Frances Sarah Curtis of Mt. Rainier, MD, applied for a White House pass. Curtis, a Treasury Department employee in the Bureau of Public Debt (BPD), had worked in the White House File Room [...]

Today’s blog post comes from National Archives social media intern Anna Fitzpatrick. Throughout the Civil War, when President Lincoln needed to concentrate—when he faced a task that required his focused and undivided attention—he would leave the White House, cross the street to the War Department, and take over the desk of Thomas T. Eckert, chief [...]

Why were neck beards ever socially acceptable? In my humble opinion, they are the facial equivalent of mullets or bowl cuts. Unlike bad haircuts, however, they may have had some useful characteristics. Maybe they kept cold wind from blowing in men’s collars. Maybe their wives objected to prickly beards and mustaches but the husbands still [...]

These days, pundits, candidates, and party activists like to cite the Constitution of the United States as the moral and legal backing for whatever they’re proposing. But the Constitution is silent on a lot of things you probably thought it said. Here are eight examples. The President can veto a proposed amendment to the Constitution. [...]

Can you search for “Wikileaks” on the National Archives web site? Yes and no. On Saturday morning, November 3, we learned via Twitter that a search for “Wikileaks” on the National Archives web site archives.gov brought up an error notice stating that the URL was banned. However, even at the same time, a search for [...]