The first fliers that appeared in the mail in the summer of 1985 seemed inconspicuous enough. All of them, though, were emblazoned with the slogan, “Be on your toes. This is Revolution Summer.”
160 years ago, the only Civil War battle fought inside the District of Columbia nearly determined the fate of the nation. On July 11-12, 1864, Confederate forces under the command of Lieutenant General Jubal Early advanced down the 7th Street Pike (today Georgia Avenue, NW) and squared off against a motley crew of Union defenders garrisoned at Fort Stevens, one of the dozens of forts and batteries ringing the capital.
War is hell, so they say. But nobody told Washington's elite in July 1861, when politicians armed with picnic baskets and champagne came to watch the first battle of the Civil War, and nearly got killed as a result.
For decades, a community of Black Washingtonians built their homes on Fort Reno, a former Civil War fort in Northwest. But a group of lawmakers, White community members, and real estate developers united to remove Reno residents from their homes. The demise of Reno City wasn't an accident--and it might've been planned from the community's inception.
From Emperor Hirohito to Nikita Khrushchev, D.C. has received adversaries with open arms. But it's not everyday when the defeated foe of a war against the United States becomes a hero, and the Army general who defeated him becomes a villain in the eyes of the nation. That's what happened when the Nez Perce leader Chief Joseph, visited Washington in 1879.
Funk band Parliament-Funkadelic has been in a long-term relationship with their African American fans from Washington, D.C. since the early 1970s. The message of Black freedom and empowerment inherent to funk music resonated with activists in the District who had fought for (and won) Home Rule, among other major political and social victories in recent years. In 1975, P-Funk released the album Chocolate City, an ode to the people of Washington, D.C.
Washington in the 1980s served as the backdrop for the emergence of hardcore punk and the straight edge movement. Fed up with what they believed was a culture of excess that had incorporated itself into the punk subculture of the 1970s, a small group of teenage Washingtonians decided to take matters into their own hands. The goal? "Renouncing the unattainable rock & roll myth, making music relevant for real people."
In 1971, twelve women moved into a house on Capitol Hill, becoming the first serious lesbian collective in America. Contentious from the start and lasting only a year and a half, these Furies (as they called themselves) nonetheless incited a reckoning within the feminist movement, with thought and theory that is still being discussed today.
Today, Washington has a lively drag scene, from brunches to balls. But the roots of that culture extend past Stonewall. In the 1880s, a freed slave named William Dorsey Swann crowned himself the first drag "queen" at gatherings in and around the Dupont Circle neighborhood.
Twenty-six thousand years ago, a mastodon dies in a sinkhole in northern Kentucky. Millenia later, he emerges again from the sediment, this time as the pièce de résistance of a bitter transatlantic intellectual battle waged by none other than Thomas Jefferson.
