Robert Pohl worked for many years as a computer programmer but recovered from that and became a full time stay-at-home dad. With his son now in school, he has expanded his horizons and become a self-taught historian. He has written books about his house as well as Emancipation in the District of Columbia. You can reach Robert at Robert[at]thehillishome.com
I’m Gordon Chaffin, a journalist in Washington DC. I cover transportation & urban planning in DC, Maryland, & Virginia for Street Justice. I explain what’s happening in the street and why. Below is a summary of last week’s transportation news. I produce reports delivered every weekday afternoon for paid subscribers and Sunday mornings for free […]
Dipping into Ellis’s Sights and Sounds of the Capital again this week, I came across his section on “The Lobby.” It is a fascinating read, and starts with a couple sentences that will resonate with my readers Every man, woman, and child in Washington, is a politician. The people inhale politics with the air they […]
The book The Sights and Secrets of the Capital I mentioned last week is a veritable treasure trove of off-beat information. Today, I want to look at one such digression, in the third section, a subsection is entitled How the Capitol is Warmed and Ventilated. The subsection begins: At the door of Room No. 59, […]
In my review of In the Shadow of the Capitol last week, I used a picture that the authors had found in a guide to Washington DC that I was not previously aware of: Dr. John B. Ellis’s 1869 Sights and Secrets of the National Capital: A Work Descriptive of Washington City in All Its […]
I was recently contacted by the authors of this book and sent a review copy. I had seen it previously and thought that I should probably read it, but thought that it was just going to cover territory that I already knew. As it turned out, I was quite wrong in this assessment. There was […]