Washington, D.C.

Even Washington D.C. couldn’t hold Harry Houdini, the original handcuff king. On New Years Day in 1906, the infamous Houdini broke out of what was said to be the strongest and toughest jail in the city.

Washington, D.C., has had its fair share of scandals, political pandemonium, and secret trysts over the years. But it’s not every day that a Congressman commits cold-blooded murder in broad daylight on a city street.

Understanding the history of local government in the District of Columbia is tricky business. The governance structure has changed several times since the city was founded in 1791 and, sometimes, these changes were quite dramatic... which brings us to the 1870s.

Here’s a fun piece of trivia: America’s most famous newspaper publisher, Joseph Pulitzer, than man who is often credited for rise of modern journalism, was married here in Washington on June 19, 1878.

On July 23, 1942, Washingtonians packed Griffith Stadium to the gills for a special “Battle of Music” between African American jazz legend Louis Armstrong and white saxophonist Charlie Barnet. In segregated Washington of the 1940s, such an organized interracial competition was a big event and few people — especially in the black community that surrounded the stadium — wanted to miss the “musical fisticuffs.”

For decades Georgetown University students have plotted daring night raids on Healy Hall, removing the clock’s hands as a prank that spawned nicknamed crews, secret hideouts, and tall tales. Administration fines and alarms haven’t stopped the tradition. Every few years, it seems, the clock goes quiet and a new heist becomes campus legend.

You can hear the rumble from miles away, a deep roar of engines joined together for a cause. This Memorial Day weekend, thousands of motorcyclists will ride in unison across Memorial Bridge, a moving force of memory and action for POW's and soldiers listed as Missing in Action. Rolling Thunder, as the demonstration is called, has been a Washington Memorial Day tradition since 1988. But do you know the history behind it?

The nation’s capital is chock full of statues, memorials, monuments, historic markers, and museums. Some are world-famous, some have been controversial, and some have been forgotten altogether. Horatio Greenough’s sculpture of George Washington has been all of these things – and more.

May 17, 1973 began an enthralling summer of reality television in Washington. That morning Senate Watergate Committee chairman Sam Ervin banged his gavel and launched hearings to investigate the details of the Watergate scandal, which had rocked the nation the previous June. Americans from coast to coast watched with great interest, trying to determine “what the President knew and when he knew it.” (Short answer: He knew a lot and he had known it for a long time.)

Nathaniel Hawthorne, author of The Scarlet Letter, visited Washington, D.C. in 1862, as the Capital was gearing up for war against the Confederacy. If you remember Hawthorne at all from school, you won’t be surprised to find he had a lot to say.

You know who was just too fabulous for Washington. D.C. to handle? Oscar Wilde. He caused quite a stir when he visited in the January of 1882 as part of a lecture tour on the “Philosophy of Aestheticism”.

Huddie William Ledbetter, known as Lead Belly, was a legendary folk and blues musician famed for his twelve‑string guitar virtuosity, powerful voice, and the many standards he popularized. His songs have been covered by artists from Bob Dylan to Led Zeppelin. But one of his lesser known works hits closest to home: "Bourgeois Blues," a searing indictment of racial segregation in Washington, D.C.