This week’s column will be slightly different than usual, as I have been given a book to review. I was sent a copy of Becoming What We Can Be: Stories of Community Development in Washington, DC, which was written by Tony Proscio, and found that the stories were indeed relevant to my interests. The book […]
In the late 19th century, tourism took off as a mass phenomenon. This meant a whole new market for guide books, which had existed for decades already, but usually more for people moving to a new location, and not for middle class tourists now thronging the great cities and important sights of the world. In […]
Over the weekend, I had the opportunity to chat with one of the builders who worked on many of the Capitol Hill houses that were fixed up during the 60s and 70s. Watch this space – and the Hill Rag – for more on him and his family, but one of the houses he mentioned […]
Last week, we saw how a story was started and spread, but how the question of the truth of the original Tribune article on which the whole story is based was casually omitted. In the article, the reporter makes a number of allegations, and, as it turns out, very few of them really happened the […]
In researching my scandal book, I was surprised in how often the scandal, as generally told differed from the scandal as it was initially reported. To researchers of urban legends, those supposedly true stories that we tell each other to make a point, this would come as no surprise. Changing details to either improve the […]