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One of the big challenges to writing a history blog is finding good images. Well, things just got a lot easier with Getty's announcement that it is making up to 35 million images available for bloggers to embed in their sites for free.

Director Frank Capra's classic 1939 film, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,  a comedy-drama about an ordinary citizen who ascends to the U.S. Senate, today is widely regarded as an uplifting, if overly sentimental, tribute to the egalitarianism at the heart of American-style democracy.

Years after Marian Anderson was famously barred from performing at D.A.R. Constitution Hall because of her race, she gave a concert at the venue. It was an overdue coda to a painful chapter in America’s cultural history.

On March 10, 1977, twelve armed Hanafi militants seized three Washington buildings and nearly 150 hostages to protest against the release of the film, Mohammed, Messenger of God and law enforcement's investigation into the murders of seven Hanafis four years earlier. The standoff that followed reverberated for years.

There was a period, from the late 1940s until the early 1960s, when Washington, D.C. was a veritable Nashville on the Potomac, a mecca that provided country performers a chance to get their records played, and to perform before big audiences.

In 1966 the University of Maryland's Cole Field House hosted the NCAA Final Four where Texas Western’s five-black starters upset all-white Kentucky. It was a watershed victory that helped accelerate the integration of college basketball.

High on Lewis Mountain, to the west of the picturesque college town of Charlottesville, sits a house that looks down on the University of Virginia. According to legend, Massachusetts resident Dr. Theodore Giesel  – better known as Dr.

Elvis Presley made headlines when he showed up at the White House unannounced and offered his services to President Nixon to fight the war on drugs in 1970.

During World War II, the job market in D.C. exploded; between 1940 and 1945, the number of civilians employed by the government almost quadrupled. The Defense Housing Registry, created by the DC government to help these new employees find housing, processed around 10,000 newcomers every month. The result? A housing crunch.

Tourists often try to time their visits to Washington to coincide with the annual blooming of its famous cherry blossom trees along the Tidal Basin in April, and inevita