The People's House - African American Influence and Presence in the White House

For America’s 250th birthday, an anthology celebrating the African American voices that influenced and shaped the history of the White House.

About the author

Michelle D. Commander, Ph.D. is Deputy Director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. A scholar of slavery and memory, Black geographies and mobility, and the speculative arts, Commander is the author of Afro-Atlantic Flight: Speculative Returns and the Black Fantastic and Avidly Reads: Passages and editor of the Penguin Classics anthology Unsung: Unheralded Narratives of American Slavery & Abolition. Recently, she served as the Consulting Curator for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibit Before Yesterday We Could Fly: An Afrofuturist Period Room. A prior Ford Foundation fellow and Fulbright scholar (Ghana), Commander is an elected member of the American Antiquarian Society.

Kathleen M. Kendrick is a curator at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. She has curated Taking the Stage, an exhibition dedicated to the history of African Americans in theater, film, and television, and co-curated Making a Way Out of No Way, a collection of stories of African American resilience. She is also the author of the Official Guide to the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture and the co-author of Smithsonian Treasures of American History and Legacies: Collecting America’s History at the Smithsonian.

Product details

• Authors: Michelle D Commander, Michelle D. Commander, Kathleen M Kendrick, Kathleen M. Kendrick
• Assisted by: Commander Michelle D. (Editor), Kendrick Kathleen M. (Editor)
• Publisher: Penguin Books USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Release: 09.06.2026
• EAN: 9780143139072
• ISBN: 978-0-14-313907-2
• No. of pages: 496
• Dimensions: 129 mm x 197 mm x 21 mm
• Subjects: Non-fiction book > History > Miscellaneous; USA, HISTORY / Social History, Social & cultural history, HISTORY / United States / State & Local / General, Local History, Social and cultural history, United States of America, USA, History of the Americas, HISTORY / African American & Black, Relating to African American / Black American people