Every American presidency since 1789, drawn as a span from the day the president took office to the day he left it. Forty-seven presidencies, forty-five men: Grover Cleveland and Donald Trump each served two non-consecutive terms and hold two numbers apiece. Eight presidents died in office, four of them by assassination. One resigned. Spans are colored by party. The current term ends on 20 January 2029. The map shows where each president first took the oath: a balcony in New York, a hotel room, a farmhouse in Vermont, an aircraft on a Dallas runway.
1st president. Unaffiliated. Took the oath on the balcony of Federal Hall in New York City, then the capital, on 30 April 1789. He set up the cabinet, put down the Whiskey Rebellion in 1794 by riding out at the head of some 13,000 militia, and kept the country out of the war between Britain and France. In 1796 he declined a third term and published a farewell address warning against party and foreign entanglement. The two-term limit he chose held by custom until 1940.
2nd president. Federalist. Sworn in at Congress Hall in Philadelphia. He fought an undeclared naval war with France, signed the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, and in November 1800 became the first president to live in the White House, still unfinished. He lost the election that year to his own vice president, Thomas Jefferson, and left Washington before dawn on inauguration day rather than attend. It was the first transfer of power between rival parties in the country's history.
3rd president. Democratic-Republican. The first president inaugurated in Washington, in the Senate chamber of the unfinished Capitol, having walked there from his boarding house. In 1803 he bought the Louisiana Territory from France for about 15 million dollars, roughly doubling the size of the country, although he doubted the Constitution allowed it. His Embargo Act of 1807, meant to punish Britain and France, did more damage to American shipping than to either.
4th president. Democratic-Republican. The principal author of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights asked Congress for war with Britain in June 1812. In August 1814 British troops entered Washington and burned the Capitol and the White House while Madison was outside the city. The war ended in a treaty that changed almost nothing, signed at Ghent before the American victory at New Orleans was fought.
5th president. Democratic-Republican. Took the oath outdoors, a first, in front of the temporary Brick Capitol where Congress met while the burned building was rebuilt. He signed the Missouri Compromise in 1820, which admitted Missouri as a slave state and Maine as a free one, and in December 1823 told Europe that the Western Hemisphere was closed to further colonization. In 1820 he was re-elected without opposition; one elector voted against him.
6th president. Democratic-Republican. Andrew Jackson won the most popular and electoral votes in 1824 but not a majority, and the House of Representatives chose Adams. When Adams then made Henry Clay, the speaker who had backed him, secretary of state, Jackson's supporters called it a corrupt bargain and spent four years running against it. Adams lost in 1828, then served 17 years in the House, where he fought the gag rule on antislavery petitions until it was repealed in 1844.
7th president. Democratic. The first president from west of the Appalachians opened the White House to the public after his inauguration, and the crowd had to be drawn out with tubs of punch on the lawn. He signed the Indian Removal Act in 1830, which led to the forced removal of the Cherokee and other nations along the Trail of Tears, and vetoed the recharter of the Second Bank of the United States in 1832. In January 1835 he survived the first attempt on a president's life, when both of the assassin's pistols misfired.
8th president. Democratic. The first president born a citizen of the United States, in 1782, and the only one whose first language was Dutch. The Panic of 1837 began weeks after he took office and turned into a depression that lasted most of his term. He opposed annexing Texas as a slave state, and in 1840 lost to the Whigs, who campaigned on log cabins and hard cider.
9th president. Whig. His inaugural address, at about 8,400 words, is still the longest, delivered on a cold, wet day without a hat or overcoat. He fell ill three weeks later and died on 4 April 1841, 31 days into his term, the shortest presidency. The story that the speech killed him is folklore; a 2014 study argued for enteric fever from the White House water supply.
10th president. Whig. The first vice president to succeed on a president's death, sworn in at Brown's Indian Queen Hotel in Washington two days after Harrison died. Critics called him His Accidency; he insisted he was president, not acting president, and the precedent held. He vetoed the Whig bank bills, his cabinet resigned except for Daniel Webster, and the Whigs expelled him in September 1841. Three days before leaving office he signed the joint resolution to annex Texas.
11th president. Democratic. He promised one term, named its goals, and met nearly all of them. He settled the Oregon boundary with Britain in 1846 and took the country into war with Mexico the same year; the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 added California and most of the present Southwest. He left office in March 1849 and died of cholera 103 days later, the shortest retirement of any president.
12th president. Whig. A career army officer and hero of the Mexican War who had never voted in a presidential election. A slaveholder, he nonetheless told Southern leaders he would hang anyone who led a state out of the Union, and pressed for California to enter as a free state. He fell ill after Independence Day ceremonies at the Washington Monument site in 1850 and died on 9 July, 16 months into his term.
13th president. Whig. Succeeded on Taylor's death and took the oath before a joint session of Congress in the House chamber. He signed the Compromise of 1850, including the Fugitive Slave Act, which required free states to help return people who had escaped slavery and split his own party. He sent Commodore Matthew Perry's squadron to Japan in 1852. He was the last Whig president; the party did not survive the decade.
14th president. Democratic. Two months before the inauguration, his only surviving son, Benjamin, was killed in a train wreck in front of him and his wife. He affirmed the oath rather than swearing it and gave his inaugural address from memory. He signed the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854, which let settlers decide on slavery and set off the fighting in Kansas, and completed the Gadsden Purchase. In 1856 his party refused to renominate him, the only elected president to seek another term and be denied it by his own party.
15th president. Democratic. Two days after his inauguration the Supreme Court issued the Dred Scott decision, which he had privately lobbied for and publicly promised to accept. Between Lincoln's election in November 1860 and the end of Buchanan's term, seven states seceded; he held that secession was illegal and that he had no power to stop it. He is the only president who never married.
16th president. Republican. Seven states had left the Union before he took the oath, and four more followed after Fort Sumter in April 1861. He issued the Emancipation Proclamation on 1 January 1863, spoke for about two minutes at Gettysburg that November, and pushed the Thirteenth Amendment, abolishing slavery, through the House in January 1865. Five days after Lee's surrender at Appomattox he was shot at Ford's Theatre, on 14 April 1865, and died the next morning.
17th president. National Union. A Democrat from Tennessee, the only senator from a seceding state to stay loyal, elected vice president on Lincoln's National Union ticket and sworn in at the Kirkwood House hotel the morning Lincoln died. He fought the Radical Republicans over Reconstruction and vetoed the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which Congress passed over his veto. Impeached in 1868 for removing his secretary of war, he was acquitted by one vote, 35 to 19. His administration bought Alaska from Russia for 7.2 million dollars.
18th president. Republican. The general who won the war used federal troops and the new Justice Department against the Ku Klux Klan, and saw the Fifteenth Amendment, guaranteeing Black men the vote, ratified in 1870. His administration was riddled with scandal, the Whiskey Ring among them, though he was not personally enriched. Bankrupted after leaving office, he finished his memoirs days before he died of throat cancer in 1885, and they restored his family's fortune.
19th president. Republican. Samuel Tilden won the popular vote in 1876; an electoral commission gave all 20 disputed electoral votes to Hayes, who won by 185 to 184. Because 4 March fell on a Sunday and the result was so contested, he took the oath privately in the White House Red Room on the evening of 3 March. In the bargain that settled the dispute, federal troops were withdrawn from the South, ending Reconstruction.
20th president. Republican. Shot on 2 July 1881 at the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad Station in Washington by Charles Guiteau, a disappointed office seeker. The bullet alone was not fatal; doctors probing the wound with unwashed fingers and instruments almost certainly caused the infection that killed him at Elberon, New Jersey, on 19 September. He served 199 days and spent 79 of them dying.
21st president. Republican. Succeeded on Garfield's death and took the oath at about 2 a.m. in his own house on Lexington Avenue in New York. He had been collector of the Port of New York, the richest patronage job in the country, and had been removed from it for running it as one. As president he signed the Pendleton Act of 1883, which created a civil service hired by examination rather than by party.
22nd president. Democratic. The first Democrat elected after the Civil War vetoed 414 bills in his first term, many of them private pension bills for Civil War veterans. In June 1886 he married Frances Folsom, 21, in the Blue Room, the only president to marry in the White House. He won the popular vote in 1888 and lost the Electoral College to Benjamin Harrison.
23rd president. Republican. The grandson of the ninth president. He signed the Sherman Antitrust Act and the McKinley Tariff in 1890, and admitted six states, North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Washington, Idaho and Wyoming, more than any other president. Electric lighting was installed in the White House in 1891, and the family was reported to be afraid to touch the switches. Cleveland beat him in 1892.
24th president. Democratic. Returned four years later, the first president to serve non-consecutive terms. The Panic of 1893 began weeks into the term. That summer he had a tumour removed from his jaw in secret, aboard a friend's yacht in Long Island Sound, and the operation was not confirmed until 1917. In 1894 he sent federal troops to break the Pullman strike.
25th president. Republican. He won the 1896 election from his front porch in Canton, Ohio, while William Jennings Bryan travelled 18,000 miles. In 1898 he led the country into war with Spain, which ended with the United States holding Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines, and annexed Hawaii the same year. He was shot at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo on 6 September 1901 by the anarchist Leon Czolgosz and died eight days later.
26th president. Republican. Succeeded on McKinley's death at 42, the youngest president, and took the oath in the library of the Ansley Wilcox house in Buffalo. He sued to break up the Northern Securities railroad trust, set aside about 230 million acres of public land, and began the Panama Canal. In 1906 he became the first American to win a Nobel Prize, for mediating the end of the Russo-Japanese War.
27th president. Republican. Roosevelt's chosen successor brought about twice as many antitrust suits as Roosevelt had, and saw Congress send the states the income-tax amendment in 1909. Roosevelt turned against him and ran as a third-party candidate in 1912; Taft finished third, with the 8 electoral votes of Utah and Vermont. Nine years later he became Chief Justice, the only person to hold both offices.
28th president. Democratic. He signed the Federal Reserve Act in 1913, won re-election in 1916 on the slogan that he had kept the country out of the war, and took it into the war in April 1917. His Fourteen Points shaped the peace at Versailles, but the Senate refused to ratify the treaty and the League of Nations he had designed. A stroke in October 1919 left him partly paralysed; for the rest of his term his wife, Edith, decided who and what reached him.
29th president. Republican. He promised a "return to normalcy" and won 60 percent of the popular vote in 1920. His administration hosted the Washington Naval Conference, which limited battleship building among the great powers. He died at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco on 2 August 1923, before the Teapot Dome scandal made his interior secretary, Albert Fall, the first cabinet member sent to prison.
30th president. Republican. Succeeded on Harding's death. His father, a notary public, swore him in by kerosene lamp at 2:47 a.m. in the family farmhouse at Plymouth Notch, Vermont. His 1925 inaugural address was the first broadcast on radio. He cut taxes and federal spending through a boom, and in 1927 handed reporters slips of paper that read: "I do not choose to run for President in nineteen twenty eight."
31st president. Republican. A mining engineer who had run food relief for Belgium and Europe during and after the First World War. Seven months into his term the stock market crashed. He signed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff in 1930 over the objections of more than 1,000 economists, and in 1932 the Army drove the Bonus Army of veterans out of Washington. He lost 42 of 48 states to Franklin Roosevelt.
32nd president. Democratic. Elected four times, the only president to serve more than two terms. He took office with a quarter of the workforce unemployed and banks closed in most states, and the New Deal followed: the bank holiday, the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Securities and Exchange Commission, Social Security in 1935. His second inauguration, in 1937, was the first held on 20 January. He led the country through the Second World War from Pearl Harbor until 12 April 1945, when he died at Warm Springs, Georgia. The Twenty-second Amendment, ratified in 1951, limited his successors to two terms.
33rd president. Democratic. Succeeded on Roosevelt's death and was sworn in in the Cabinet Room at 7:09 p.m., after 82 days as vice president. Within four months he authorised the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He backed the Marshall Plan, signed the treaty that created NATO, desegregated the armed forces by executive order in 1948, and won that year's election against every forecast, as the Chicago Daily Tribune's "Dewey Defeats Truman" headline recorded.
34th president. Republican. The commander of the D-Day landings ended the Korean War with an armistice in July 1953. He signed the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, which built 41,000 miles of interstate, and in 1957 sent the 101st Airborne to Little Rock to enforce school desegregation. His farewell address, in January 1961, warned of the "military-industrial complex".
35th president. Democratic. At 43 the youngest person elected president, and the first Catholic. Three months in, the Bay of Pigs invasion failed. In October 1962 he faced down the Soviet Union over missiles in Cuba for thirteen days. He set the goal of landing a man on the Moon before the decade was out. He was assassinated in Dallas on 22 November 1963, 1,036 days into his term.
36th president. Democratic. Sworn in aboard Air Force One at Love Field, Dallas, the same afternoon, by Judge Sarah T. Hughes, the only woman to administer the presidential oath. He signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the laws creating Medicare and Medicaid, and escalated the war in Vietnam to more than 500,000 troops. On 31 March 1968 he told the country he would not seek another term.
37th president. Republican. He went to Beijing in February 1972, signed the first strategic arms limitation treaty with the Soviet Union that May, created the Environmental Protection Agency and ended the draft. In June 1972 men working for his re-election were arrested inside the Watergate. After the White House tapes showed he had ordered the cover-up, he resigned on 9 August 1974, the only president to do so.
38th president. Republican. Succeeded on Nixon's resignation and was sworn in in the East Room. Appointed vice president under the Twenty-fifth Amendment, he is the only president never elected president or vice president. A month later he pardoned Nixon. In September 1975 he survived two assassination attempts in California, 17 days apart, both by women.
39th president. Democratic. He walked from the Capitol to the White House after his inauguration. He brokered the Camp David Accords between Egypt and Israel in 1978 and signed the treaties that returned the Panama Canal. Iranian students held 52 Americans hostage for 444 days; they were released minutes after his term ended. He lived to 100, longer than any other president.
40th president. Republican. The first president inaugurated on the Capitol's West Front, and at 69 the oldest to that point. Ten weeks later he was shot outside the Washington Hilton and survived. He cut the top income tax rate from 70 to 28 percent over two tax acts, and in December 1987 signed the INF Treaty with Mikhail Gorbachev, the first to eliminate a whole class of nuclear weapons. His second inauguration was moved indoors by the cold.
41st president. Republican. The Berlin Wall came down in his first year and the Soviet Union dissolved in his third. He assembled a coalition of 35 countries to expel Iraq from Kuwait; the ground war in 1991 lasted 100 hours. He signed the Americans with Disabilities Act and, in 1990, a budget deal that broke his "Read my lips: no new taxes" pledge. He lost to Bill Clinton in 1992.
42nd president. Democratic. The first Democrat since Franklin Roosevelt to win two full terms. He signed NAFTA and a 1993 deficit-reduction budget, and the federal government ran surpluses from 1998 to 2001. Impeached by the House in December 1998 over testimony about his relationship with a White House intern, he was acquitted by the Senate in February 1999 and left office with the highest approval rating of any departing president since the Second World War.
43rd president. Republican. The 2000 election was decided by 537 votes in Florida and a 5-to-4 Supreme Court ruling that stopped the recount. Eight months in, the September 11 attacks killed nearly 3,000 people. He ordered the invasions of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003, signed No Child Left Behind and the Medicare drug benefit, and in his last autumn the TARP bank rescue as the financial system failed.
44th president. Democratic. The first Black president. Chief Justice Roberts misplaced a word in the oath on 20 January 2009, so it was given again the next evening in the Map Room. He signed the 2009 stimulus and, in March 2010, the Affordable Care Act, ordered the raid that killed Osama bin Laden in May 2011, and joined the Paris climate agreement in 2016. He won the Nobel Peace Prize nine months into his first term.
45th president. Republican. The first president with no prior government or military service. He signed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act in 2017 and appointed three Supreme Court justices. He was impeached twice, in December 2019 over Ukraine and in January 2021 after the attack on the Capitol, and acquitted by the Senate both times. He lost re-election in 2020 and did not attend his successor's inauguration.
46th president. Democratic. At 78 the oldest president at inauguration, sworn in two weeks after the attack on the Capitol, before a Mall planted with flags instead of people because of the pandemic. He signed the 1.9-trillion-dollar American Rescue Plan and the bipartisan infrastructure law, and withdrew the last troops from Afghanistan in August 2021. He left the 2024 race on 21 July 2024, after winning his party's primaries, later than any incumbent before him.
47th president. Republican. Returned in 2025, the second president after Cleveland to serve non-consecutive terms, and at 78 older on inauguration day than Biden had been. Cold moved the ceremony into the Capitol Rotunda, the first indoor inauguration since 1985. The second term has brought sweeping tariffs and, from February 2026, a war with Iran; the Donald Trump: A Life and The Middle East Conflict timelines follow both. The term ends on 20 January 2029.