Washington, D.C.

Though Rosa Parks may be the face of peaceful resistance to segregation on public transportation, she was not the first to adopt the strategy. Claudette Colvin, Ellen Harris, Maggie Lena Walker, Ida B. Wells, and Charlotte Brown are just some of the individuals who took a stand against racist policies enacted after the Civil War. In Washington, D.C., one of these civil rights activists whose name has been almost forgotten was Barbara Pope. In 1906, she claimed her right to remain in the first-class seat which she had paid for, rather than be moved to the segregated car.

Washington, DC, has a rich baseball history stretching back over 160 years. But long before the Nationals and Senators of Major League Baseball and the Negro leagues’ Homestead Grays won over legions of fans, famed abolitionist Frederick Douglass’s son Charles paved the way for black ballplayers in the District.

While it’s known today for its forested hiking trails and outdoor memorial to America’s 26th president, Theodore Roosevelt Island played a prominent role in Washington, DC’s Civil War history. In 1863, the island became home to Camp Greene, training grounds of the 1st United States Colored Troops (USCT), a Black infantry regiment recruited in the District.

In the 1920s, entrepreneur Hattie Sewell looked to put her extensive experience in the hospitality industry to work turning around the Peirce Mill Teahouse in Rock Creek Park. But as a Black businesswoman in the 1920s, Sewell faced harsh blow back, even as her business thrived.

Should the National Mall really be a National Lake? Leon Krier thought so! The Luxembourgish architect came to D.C. in the 1970s and saw Washington as an unfinished sketch waiting to be painted in full. Read about his fantastical plans to "finish" our capital city.

Though they may fall by the wayside of textbooks, without the efforts American women made toward the Revolution, the Continental Army would have been in dire straits indeed. Luckily, the women of Maryland and Virginia met the challenges of supply shortages, low morale, and lack of funds with determination and patriotism.

On a chilly Saturday in October of 1967, more than 100,000 people gathered in Washington to protest America's involvement in the Vietnam War. More than half of them would then march to the Pentagon, where photojournalist Bernie Boston snapped one of the Antiwar Movement's most iconic photographs. Later in the evening, though, as demonstrators faced off with soldiers and US Marshals, the protest turned more dangerous.

Before Emmylou Harris became a renowned musician, singer, songwriter, and activist, she was a struggling single mother in the D.C. area. A meeting at Clyde's in Georgetown would change her life.

In a city full of monuments and memorials like Washington, not all of them can be beautiful. Exhibit A: The Temperance Fountain at Seventh Street and Indiana Avenue, NW. So how did we come in possession of this strange piece of public art?

In the 1920s, a group of D.C. women formed the Anti-Flirt Club to put a stop to the increasingly annoying, and at times dangerous, problem of men harassing women from motor vehicles and street corners. 

In the early 1990s, the Smithsonian found itself embroiled in national controversy over one of its planned exhibitions, making enemies of newspapers, veterans groups, and even Congress. What was the right way to display the plane that dropped the atomic bomb?

Long before D.C. baseball fans started cheering for the Nationals, D.C. came close to landing a different MLB franchise — The San Diego Padres. Jerseys were printed, schedules were made, and the team was nearly moved, but a last minute deal kept them in San Diego, beginning a 33-year baseball drought in D.C.