First Ladies by Betty Caroli Page A

Brigade, Concord, New Hampshire; Arlene C. Palmer of the New Britain (Connecticut) Public Library; and Betty Monkman, Associate Curator at the White House.
    Staffs of the following institutions also responded to my requests for information: the Western Reserve Historical Society; the Historical Department of Spiegel Grove, in Fremont, Ohio; the Historical Department of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints; the Cincinnati Historical Society; the Albany Institute of History and Art; the Chicago Historical Society; the Buffalo and Erie County HistoricalSociety; the Library of the State University of New York at Oswego; the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe; the Illinois State Historical Library, Springfield; the University of Alabama Library; Yale University Library; the Virginia Historical Society; the Historical Society of Pennsylvania; the Mount Vernon Ladies Association; the Princeton University Library; and the Library of Congress.
    For permission to quote from the following manuscript collections, I wish to thank: Cornell University Library, the Moore Family Papers; New Britain Public Library, Elihu Burritt’s Journal; the University of Tennessee Library, the Papers of Margaret and Smiley Blanton; Penfield Library of State University at Oswego, the Papers of Millard Fillmore; Massachusetts Historical Society, the Adams Family Papers; the Virginia Historical Society, the letters of Martha Washington; the Library of Congress, the Papers of Woodrow Wilson; and the Ohio Historical Society, the Papers of Warren G. Harding.
    Among my nonacademic friends who assisted in this project were Carey Vennema, who provided a new footnote program for my antiquated word processor; Catherine Faulconer, who assisted in selecting photographs; Enid Bell, Victoria Wion, and Richard Beeson, who offered many suggestions.
    New York City is rich in libraries and I have used many of them during the course of researching this book. I am particularly grateful to the staffs of the libraries of New York University, Columbia University, the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and the 42nd Street Public Library where I worked in the Wertheim Room. Librarians at Kingsborough Community College of the City University of New York have for many years responded generously to my requests for help.
    Released time from teaching came from Kingsborough Community College (in the early stage of research) and from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The latter granted me a Fellowship that freed me from teaching during the 1985–1986 academic year, when I finished the project.
    Susan Rabiner, of Oxford University Press, not only edited this book—she helped shape it through several different versions. She is the ideal editor, both critic and friend, and I thank her and her diligent, cheerful assistants, Rachel Toor, who entered the editing process even before beginning work at Oxford, and Judith Mintz, who came in for the final version.
    Livio Caroli arrived in New York in 1965 with very little interest in American history (which he found lacking in political intrigue when compared with that of his native Venice) but he has gradually revisedhis opinion. His “outsider’s view” that the institution of First Lady was an interesting American invention helped convince me that the subject required a book, and he has enthusiastically supported the project to its completion.
    B. B. C.
    New York City

September 1994
    Note to 2010 edition
    In the many years I have watched White House occupants, trying to figure out what was innovation and what was repetition, I have had the help of family, friends, and colleagues. How can I thank all those who clipped articles, called my attention to obscure sources, encouraged me to think differently? Two groups have been particularly helpful—the Narrative Writing Group and the seminar Women Writing Women’s Lives.
    As this book has grown over the last two