When President George Washington celebrated his 65th birthday at a ball in Philadelphia, his chef Hercules Posey was an underrated part of the equation, writes Ramin Ganeshram for The New York Times.

But that wasn't always the case. In the late 1700s, George Washington's chef was the enslaved Black man Hercules Posey, who has largely been lost to history. But a group of historians is trying to ...

Hercules "lavished the most of these large avails upon dress," according to George Washington ... In the fall of 1769, Washington became quite annoyed with his neighbor, John Posey, because ...