September 30, 2007

  • True or False?

    True or False?

    Legend asserts the White House gained its name from the color of paint chosen for the new structure that replaced the one burned down by the British in 1814.

    white house

    The answer is False:  This is what snopes.com says:  The legend does not correspond to historical fact.  The President’s House had been given a coat of whitewash as early as 1798.  References to the building as the “White House” antedate the War of 1812.  As early as the spring of 1811, Francis James Jackson, the former British minister to the US, wrote that his successor would “act as a sort of political conductor to attract the lightning that my issue from the clouds round the Capitol and the White House at Washington.”

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