Emily Bussa

Although Emily Bussa enjoys learning about local history, she hates organizing the local history section of the public library where she works because all the books have the same Dewey decimal numbers. A native of Long Island, New York, she grew up in the same neighborhood where Anna Smith Strong once famously hung her petticoats to communicate with members of the Culper Spy Ring during the Revolutionary War. She currently studies viola performance and English at University of Maryland. Outside of class, she enjoys listening to DC local music and is co-president of Maryland Academic Quiz Team.

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No doubt D.C. music fans were intrigued when they picked up the Washington City Paper on September 23, 1983: "Funk funk funk funk it up at the pick of the picks tonite…a combination of punk and funk that should be the hottest show of the summer." For the first time, Trouble Funk and Minor Threat would be performing together. The show melded D.C.'s dominant homegrown music styles, Go-go and Hardcore Punk, and promised to be a concert like no other.

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.”

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."

"If you were to ask the first comer you meet in the street whether he knew 'Hiawatha' he would immediately be able to whistle it," wrote the Washington Post in 1904. Read about one of the most anticipated musical events of that year, featuring Anglo-African composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor and his namesake Choral Society.