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Lafayette Square, Washington, D.C.
Lafayette Square is a seven-acre (30,000 m2) public park located within President's Park, Washington, D.C., United States, directly north of the White House on H Street, bounded by Jackson Place on the west, Madison Place on the east and Pennsylvania Avenue on the south. It is named for Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette, a French aristocrat and hero of the American Revolutionary War (1775–1783) and includes several statues of revolutionary heroes from Europe, including Lafayette, and at its center a famous statue of early 19th century U.S. president and general Andrew Jackson on horseback with both of the horse's front hooves raised. The square and the surrounding structures were designated the Lafayette Square Historic District in 1970. Initial plans Planned as part of the pleasure grounds surrounding the Executive Mansion, the square was originally part of President's Park, which is the larger National Park Service unit that also includes the White House gro ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
President's Park
President's Park, located in Downtown Washington, D.C., encompasses the White House and includes the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, the Treasury Building, and grounds; the White House Visitor Center; Lafayette Square; and The Ellipse. President's Park was the original name of Lafayette Square. The current President's Park is administered by the National Park Service. The park is officially referred to as President's Park or The White House and President's Park. White House and adjacent buildings Washington, D.C. was designated as the site for the United States capital in the 1790 Residence Act, with authority given to President George Washington to ready the capital for the government by June 1800. Contests were held to solicit designs for both the United States Capitol and what was then called the President's House. James Hoban's design was selected, and he supervised the construction. Later on, the future "White House" was expanded with the West Wing and East Wing, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Decatur House
Decatur House is a historic house museum at 748 Jackson Place in Washington, D.C., the capital of the United States. It is named after its first owner and occupant Stephen Decatur. The house (built, 1818) is located at the northwest corner of Lafayette Square, at the southwest corner of Jackson Place and H Street, near the White House. A museum, it now serves as the National Center for White House History, managed by the White House Historical Association. History Decatur House is one of the oldest surviving homes in Washington, D.C., and one of only three remaining houses in the country designed by neoclassical architect Benjamin Henry Latrobe. Completed in 1818 for naval hero Stephen Decatur and his wife, Susan, the Federal Style house is prominently located across Lafayette Square from the White House. It was successively home to Henry Clay, Martin Van Buren and Edward Livingston, who collectively made Decatur House the unofficial residence of the Secretary of State from 1 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Daniel Sickles
Daniel Edgar Sickles (October 20, 1819May 3, 1914) was an American politician, soldier, and diplomat. Born to a wealthy family in New York City, Sickles was involved in a number of scandals, most notably the 1859 homicide of his wife's lover, U.S. Attorney Philip Barton Key II, whom Sickles gunned down in broad daylight in Lafayette Square, across the street from the White House. He was acquitted after using temporary insanity as a legal defense for the first time in United States history. Upon the outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861, Sickles became one of the war's most prominent political generals, recruiting the New York regiments that became known as the Excelsior Brigade in the Army of the Potomac. Despite his lack of military experience, he served as a brigade, division, and corps commander in some of the early Eastern campaigns. His military career ended at the Battle of Gettysburg in July 1863, after he moved his III Corps without orders to an untenable position ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Picturesque
Picturesque is an aesthetic ideal introduced into English cultural debate in 1782 by William Gilpin in ''Observations on the River Wye, and Several Parts of South Wales, etc. Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty; made in the Summer of the Year 1770'', a practical book which instructed England's leisured travellers to examine "the face of a country by the rules of picturesque beauty". Picturesque, along with the aesthetic and cultural strands of Gothic and Celticism, was a part of the emerging Romantic sensibility of the 18th century. The term "picturesque" needs to be understood in relationship to two other aesthetic ideals: the ''beautiful'' and the '' sublime''. By the last third of the 18th century, Enlightenment and rationalist ideas about aesthetics were being challenged by looking at the experiences of beauty and sublimity as non-rational. Aesthetic experience was not just a rational decision – one did not look at a pleasing curved form and decide it was beauti ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Millard Fillmore
Millard Fillmore (January 7, 1800March 8, 1874) was the 13th president of the United States, serving from 1850 to 1853; he was the last to be a member of the Whig Party while in the White House. A former member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Upstate New York, Fillmore was elected as the 12th vice president of the United States in 1848, and succeeded to the presidency in July 1850 upon the death of U.S. President Zachary Taylor. Fillmore was instrumental in the passing of the Compromise of 1850, a bargain that led to a brief truce in the battle over the expansion of slavery. He failed to win the Whig nomination for president in 1852 but gained the endorsement of the nativist Know Nothing Party four years later and finished third in the 1856 presidential election. Fillmore was born into poverty in the Finger Lakes area of New York State, and his parents were tenant farmers during his formative years. Though he had little formal schooling, he rose from poverty b ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Andrew Jackson Downing
Andrew Jackson Downing (October 31, 1815 – July 28, 1852) was an American landscape designer, horticulturist, and writer, a prominent advocate of the Gothic Revival in the United States, and editor of ''The Horticulturist'' magazine (1846–52). Downing is considered to be a founder of American landscape architecture. Early life Downing was born in Newburgh, New York, to Samuel Downing, a wheelwright and later nurseryman, and Eunice Bridge. After finishing his schooling at sixteen, he worked in his father's nursery in the Town of Newburgh, and gradually became interested in landscape gardening and architecture. He began writing on botany and landscape gardening and then undertook to educate himself thoroughly in these subjects. He married Caroline DeWint, daughter of John Peter DeWint, in 1838. Professional career His official writing career started when he began producing articles for various newspapers and horticultural journals in the 1830s. In 1841 his first book, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Henry Adams
Henry Brooks Adams (February 16, 1838 – March 27, 1918) was an American historian and a member of the Adams political family, descended from two U.S. Presidents. As a young Harvard graduate, he served as secretary to his father, Charles Francis Adams, Abraham Lincoln's ambassador to the United Kingdom. The posting influenced the younger man through the experience of wartime diplomacy, and absorption in English culture, especially the works of John Stuart Mill. After the American Civil War, he became a political journalist who entertained America's foremost intellectuals at his homes in Washington and Boston. During his lifetime, he was best known for ''The History of the United States of America 1801–1817'', a nine-volume work, praised for its literary style, command of the documentary evidence, and deep (family) knowledge of the period and its major figures. His posthumously published memoir, ''The Education of Henry Adams'', won the Pulitzer Prize and went on to be nam ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
John Hay
John Milton Hay (October 8, 1838July 1, 1905) was an American statesman and official whose career in government stretched over almost half a century. Beginning as a private secretary and assistant to Abraham Lincoln, Hay's highest office was United States Secretary of State under Presidents William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt. Hay was also an author and biographer, and wrote poetry and other literature throughout much of his life. Born in Indiana to an anti-slavery family that moved to Warsaw, Illinois when he was young, Hay showed great potential, and his family sent him to Brown University. After graduation in 1858, Hay read law in his uncle's office in Springfield, Illinois, adjacent to that of Lincoln. Hay worked for Lincoln's successful presidential campaign and became one of his private secretaries at the White House. Throughout the American Civil War, Hay was close to Lincoln and stood by his deathbed after the President was shot at Ford's Theatre. In addition to hi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Dolley Madison
Dolley Todd Madison (née Payne; May 20, 1768 – July 12, 1849) was the wife of James Madison, the fourth president of the United States from 1809 to 1817. She was noted for holding Washington social functions in which she invited members of both political parties, essentially spearheading the concept of bipartisan cooperation. Previously, founders such as Thomas Jefferson would only meet with members of one party at a time, and politics could often be a violent affair resulting in physical altercations and even duels. Madison helped to create the idea that members of each party could amicably socialize, network, and negotiate with each other without violence. By innovating political institutions as the wife of James Madison, Dolley Madison did much to define the role of the President's spouse, known only much later by the title first lady—a function she had sometimes performed earlier for the widowed Thomas Jefferson. Madison also helped to furnish the newly constructed Whit ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Henry Clay
Henry Clay Sr. (April 12, 1777June 29, 1852) was an American attorney and statesman who represented Kentucky in both the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives. He was the seventh House speaker as well as the ninth secretary of state, also receiving electoral votes for president in the 1824, 1832, and 1844 presidential elections. He helped found both the National Republican Party and the Whig Party. For his role in defusing sectional crises, he earned the appellation of the "Great Compromiser" and was part of the "Great Triumvirate" of Congressmen, alongside fellow Whig Daniel Webster and John C. Calhoun. Clay was born in Hanover County, Virginia, in 1777, beginning his legal career in Lexington, Kentucky, in 1797. As a member of the Democratic-Republican Party, Clay won election to the Kentucky state legislature in 1803 and to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1810. He was chosen as Speaker of the House in early 1811 and, along with President James Madison, led ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Martin Van Buren
Martin Van Buren ( ; nl, Maarten van Buren; ; December 5, 1782 – July 24, 1862) was an American lawyer and statesman who served as the eighth president of the United States from 1837 to 1841. A primary founder of the Democratic Party (United States), Democratic Party, he served as New York (state), New York's Attorney General of New York, attorney general, U.S. Senator, U.S. senator, then briefly as the ninth governor of New York before joining Andrew Jackson's administration as the tenth United States secretary of state, minister to the United Kingdom, and ultimately the eighth vice president of the United States when 1832 Democratic National Convention, named Jackson's running mate for the 1832 United States presidential election, 1832 election. Van Buren won the presidency in 1836 United States presidential election, 1836, lost re-election in 1840, and failed to win the Democratic nomination in 1844. Later in his life, Van Buren emerged as an Politician, elder statesman ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
William Wilson Corcoran
William Wilson Corcoran (December 27, 1798 – February 24, 1888) was an American banker, philanthropist, and art collector. He founded the Corcoran Gallery of Art. Early life Corcoran was born on December 27, 1798, in Georgetown in the District of Columbia. He was one of 12 children (six boys and six girls), six of whom survived to maturity, born to Thomas Corcoran, a well-to-do merchant twice elected as mayor of Georgetown, and Hannah Lemmon. His father was born in Ireland, settled in Georgetown in 1788, and established a leather business. William Corcoran was raised in Georgetown where he studied classics and mathematics at local private schools run by Alexander Kirk and the Reverend Addison Belt, and also took classes for a year at Georgetown College. Instead of finishing his education, he joined the family business and developed a successful business career. Career Corcoran entered business at the age of 17, working in dry goods store owned by two brothers, and ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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