List of firsts in the United States
This is a list of firsts in the United States.
Presidents
- President of the United States: George Washington (1789)
- President to reside in the White House: John Adams (1797)
- President who was not born a British subject: Martin Van Buren (b. Kinderhook, New York, 5 December, 1782)
- President to serve without a Vice President: James Madison (1812-13)
- President to die in office: William Henry Harrison (1841)
- President to be photographed: William Henry Harrison (daguerrotype, 1841)
- President assassinated: Abraham Lincoln (1865)
- President to be impeached: Andrew Johnson (1868)
- President elected to a second non-consecutive term: Grover Cleveland (First term 1885–1889, second term 1893–1897)
- Presidents to have their voice recorded: Benjamin Harrison (1889), Grover Cleveland (second term) (1892)
- President to make a radio broadcast Woodrow Wilson (1919) (to US troops)
- Presidential inauguration to be broadcast on the radio Warren G. Harding (1921)
- President elected to a third (or fourth) term: Franklin D. Roosevelt (1940)
- President to appear on television Harry S. Truman (1947)
- President to resign from office: Richard Nixon (1974)
- President not elected as either President or Vice President: Gerald Ford, appointed Vice President (1973) under the terms of the 25th Amendment, succeeded to the Presidency on the resignation of Richard Nixon (1974)
- Female Presidential candidate: Victoria Woodhull (1872)
- Female presidential candidate from one of the two major parties to come closest to clinching the party's nomination: Hillary Rodham Clinton (2008)
- African American president: Barack Obama (2008)
Vice-Presidents
- Vice President of the United States: John Adams (1789)
- Vice President to be subsequently elected President: John Adams (1797)
- Vice President to die in office: George Clinton (d. 1812)
- Vice President to resign from office: John C. Calhoun (28 December 1832)
- Vice President to assume the office of president upon the death of his predecessor: John Tyler (1841)
- Vice President sworn in outside the United States: William R. King, (Havana, Cuba, 1853)
Other
- Chief Justice of the United States: John Jay (1789)
- Minority Justice of the United States Supreme Court: Thurgood Marshall (1967)
- Female Justice of the United States Supreme Court: Sandra Day O'Connor (1982)
- Woman elected to the House of Representatives: Jeannette Rankin (1916)
- Female senator: Rebecca Felton (appointed 21 November, 1922)
- Female elected to the Senate: Hattie Wyatt Caraway (1932)
- Female named to a presidential cabinet: Frances Perkins (Secretary of Labor, 1933)
- Female Speaker of the United States House of Representatives: Nancy Pelosi (elected 3 January, 2007)
- Black mayor of a major US City: Carl B. Stokes, Cleveland, 1968 (elected 1967)
- Manned flight: by Frenchman Jean-Pierre Blanchard, in a hydrogen-filled balloon, from a prison yard in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to Gloucester County, New Jersey. January 9 1793.