The tunnels underneath Capitol Hill have always fascinated me, and anyone who has seen the bookcases that line every free space in my house knows my love of books. It is therefore inevitable that I write about the book tunnel that connected the Jefferson Building of the Library of Congress with the Capitol in the […]
Today’s piece really should be called, “Hooray, the National Intelligencer is online!” Yes, the first run of this venerable newspaper, founded in 1800 as Washington’s paper of record, is finally available at the Library of Congress. The insights that can be gleaned about the early days of the nation’s new capital are invaluable. In looking […]
One last summer holiday for 2016 and I do hope most of most of my readers are out enjoying the weather instead of reading what I have come up with this time. So I will make do with a rerun – though the vast new information that has been added online since I last looked […]
Given that France was the first ally that the United States had, it is remarkable that it was not until the Civil War that a French warship visited the capital of the United States. However, this is exactly what the newspapers of the time insisted was the case when the Gassendi visited the Washington Navy […]
This weekend, I was pointed to a post by Architect of the Capital (not to be confused with the Architect of the Capitol) about a trove of Soviet-era maps, the men who have made a study of them – and the map of Washington, D.C. that was created at a time when it might have […]