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
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 […]
I mentioned last week that I had looked through the books at Hathitrust.org for those that had gone out of copyright at the beginning of the year. While the reminiscences of the Civil War on Capitol Hill was obviously the more striking, there was another book that caught my eye: Rider’s Washington: A Guide Book […]