Nothing says Washington quite like the Willard InterContinental Hotel. Nathaniel Hawthorne once noted: "The Willard Hotel more justly could be called the center of Washington than either the Capitol or the White House or the State Department." Located just a block from the White House in the heart of the nation's capital, the Willard has housed or hosted U.S. presidents for a century and a half, beginning with Franklin Pierce in 1853. The Lincoln family stayed there in the week leading up to his inauguration; Richard Nixon used the Willard for his national campaign headquarters.
Women often emerge from the history of the American West as academic icons. Scholars have pored over diaries and letters with the idea of portraying even the most ordinary Madonnas-of-the-prairie as reliable sources. After all, it was proto-feminists struggling against the frontier patriarchy who actually won the West, or so we're led to believe.
