William Hushka, an immigrant from Lithuania, was a World War I US Army veteran who joined the 1932 Bonus Marchers in their campaign to secure early payment of veterans' pensions from the government. Along with fellow veteran and marcher Eric Carlson,…

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…

Memorial Lodge is a small, flat-roofed, one-story building less than 500 feet east of the Washington Monument. It serves as an information station where tickets can be retrieved to visit the top of the Washington Monument. Originally constructed in…

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…

Benjamin Latrobe drew a plan for the layout of a national university on the Mall while he was Surveyor to the Capitol building. He may have been inspired to do so by President James Madison's mention of the idea of creating a national university in…

Freeman Hunt wrote a series of articles for his Merchants' Magazine in the spring of 1848 describing the history and current state of the capital city, which was mostly undeveloped at the time. In the second installment of the series he wrote about…

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…

The Mall in London, which runs along the side of Saint James Park, was originally a playing field for King Charles II of England and his courtiers. They played pall-mall, a game similar to croquet. By the mid-1700s, it had become a tree-lined avenue…

Solomon Brown was likely the first African American employee at the Smithsonian Institution. He began work there in 1852 as a maintenance worker, building exhibit cabinets, cleaning, and moving specimens. He advanced to serve as clerk to Secretary…