Hannah Schuster

There are some teams you expect to see excel each year in college basketball. Schools like the University of North Carolina or UCLA, which holds the record for most NCAA championship wins at 11. In 2006, George Mason was not one of those teams. The Fairfax school had only advanced to the NCAA tournament three times, and it had never won a single tournament game. Mason, largely a commuter school at the time, had only been playing in Division I since 1978.

But that year, the Patriots, who one columnist remarked "put the 'mid' in 'mid-major'" school,  went a wild, impressive journey to the NCAA Final Four. 

Gary Oelze purchased a Shirlington restaurant called the Birchmere in the mid 1960s. At the time, he wasn't planning to get into the music business. But soon, the Birchmere became a hub for bluegrass music in the nation's capital. Today, it is an internationally renowned music hall that draws fans of every musical genre. 

Washington, D.C. hosted the 1969 All-Star game at RFK stadium. It was a thrilling event that drew baseball fans together to watch the greats of the MLB, including hometown hero Frank Howard, go head-to-head. But the game also made history as the first, and only, All-Star game to be postponed due to weather. A torrential rain storm disrupted the city's plans, but that didn't stop more than 45,000 fans from coming out to RFK the next afternoon. 

You might be familiar with the Red Scare, Senator Joseph McCarthy's efforts to remove suspected communists from the U.S. State Department. But what about the Lavender Scare? Starting in the 1940s, government officials began firing thousands of employees based on their sexual orientation. Frank Kameny, a Harvard-educated astronomer was one of them. He lost his job in 1957 and challenged the dismissal all the way to the Supreme Court. 

By mid 1944, Washingtonians had known for some time that a major invasion of Europe was in store. But when news of D-Day came on June 6, 1944, it was still a sobering event. The city reacted with a combination of pause and activity.

When I.M. Pei, the celebrated Chinese-American architect from New York, was selected to design a new addition for D.C.’s National Gallery of Art, the Washington Post’s architecture critic remarked it was “no doubt one of the toughest [assignments] since Michelangelo was asked to put a dome on St. Peter’s.” Pei knew it would be a difficult task to build the new gallery, but that did not deter him. This is the story of how one of Washington's most unique buildings came to be.