Harold L. Ickes was the longest serving Secretary of the Interior to date, holding the post for 13 years from 1933 until 1946. He supported civil rights for African Americans, desegregating the Department of the Interior, including the National…

The Columbian Institute was a Washington organization dedicated to the promotion of the arts and sciences for the benefit of the nation. In 1820, two years after their official charter was approved by Congress, the Institute was granted five acres of…

Located on the grounds of the Washington Monument, the Survey Lodge was originally a boiler and steam house for the machinery necessary to power the Washington Monument's elevator. It was constructed of leftover marble and granite from the…

For more than five decades, the Main Navy and Munitions Buildings dominated the scenery along Constitution Avenue for a third of a mile west of the Washington Monument. Erected in 1918 as "temporary" office buildings to support the vastly expanded…

During the Civil War, the Department of the Treasury hired women workers to fill clerical positions vacated by men who had left to fight with the Union Army. Until that time, clerking was strictly a male occupation. Believing women were particularly…

Standing in the shape of the Smithsonian Institution sunburst, close to 4,000 Smithsonian staff, interns, fellows, and volunteers gathered on the National Mall in front of the Smithsonian Castle on Thursday, July 1, for this group portrait. This was…

These mallets and ball were used to play a game called pall mall, which involved hitting the ball down a green playing field and through an iron hoop. The game was popular in England in the late 1600s and continued to be played into the early 1800s.…

President Adams' diary entries from June 1827 detail his regular visits to the White House garden. In this entry he describes the variety of plants in the garden, from fruit trees to common weeds. The President relied on his gardener, John Ousley, to…

Tamaki Miura performed an aria from Madame Butterfly as part of the opening performance for the Sylvan Theatre on the Washington Monument grounds in June 1917. Miura was a Japanese opera singer who toured Europe and the United States in the 1910s and…

Diana Hopkins lived in the White House in the early 1940s with her father Harry, who was a special assistant to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. This article reports on the victory garden she was allowed to have on the White House grounds during…