In this current wave of hopeful historiocity (sic) comes a fine new book for children of all ages that splendidly arrays American history. The National Children’s Book and Literary Alliance conceived and curated Our White House: Looking In Looking Out (Candlewick Press), a collection of essays, personal accounts, historical fiction, and poetry that employs the White House as a telescope to view both interesting and important facts (for lack of a better word) about our collective past.

With eloquent simplicity, David McCullough (1776, John Adams) introduces this anthology of more than a hundred artists:

What a splendid thing it is that so charming and lively a book as this captures so much of the story of the White House. Let us hope it will be read and enjoyed far and wide for a very long time to come. It is our White House, after all. It is our story, after all.

From one of my favorite entries:

The great drawing-room, which I have already mentioned, and the other chambers on the ground-floor, were crowded to excess. The company was not, in our sense of the term, select, for it comprehended persons of very many grades and classes; nor was there any great display of costly attire: indeed, some of the costumes may have been, for aught I know, grotesque enough. But the decorum and propriety of behaviour which prevailed, were unbroken by any rude or disagreeable incident; and every man, even among the miscellaneous crowd in the hall who were admitted without any orders or tickets to look on, appeared to feel that he was a part of the Institution, and was responsible for its preserving a becoming character, and appearing to the best advantage.

Which was written by Charles Dickens upon attending an evening event at the White House in 1848.

Yes we did.