These young Pages participate in a snowball fight on the Capitol grounds. The Congressional Page program began during the 20th Congress (1827-1829). In the early 1900s, Pages, also called messengers, were generally local Washington children, many of…

Although most of the office buildings constructed on the Mall to house war department offices during World War I and II had been removed by the 1960s, a row of buildings from 1918 still stood in the space between Constitution Avenue and the…

Held in the spring of 1957, the Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom was organized by the newly formed Southern Leaders Conference (later known as the Southern Christian Leadership Coalition or SCLC). 25,000 demonstrators attended the event at the Lincoln…

The National Air and Space Museum holds the world's largest collection of historic aircraft and spacecraft. A second location in Chantilly, Virginia, opened in 2003 to display even more items from its collection, including the Space Shuttle…

The creation of a memorial to Civil War Union General George Meade was first proposed by the Pennsylvania legislature in 1911. Congress approved the memorial in 1915, but conflicts between the Pennsylvania Meade Memorial Commission and the Washington…

Slave trading establishments in Washington, DC are superimposed on this 1855 Atlas of Washington, DC to show the locations of a few of the many slave trading establishments in the city. Businesses flourished on the Mall's borders including slave…

On the afternoon of August 23, 2011, a 5.8 magnitude earthquake occurred in Mineral, Virginia which was felt as far away as New York state. In Washington, DC the Washington Monument swayed from the force of the earthquake. Visitors were evacuated by…

Henry Latrobe, an architect of the US Capitol, was also the chief engineer of the Washington City Canal. He prepared drawings of the canal locks in 1810, before construction began. The Canal was about one mile long and passed in front of the Capitol.…

In the late 1990s, beavers threatened the cherry trees at the Tidal Basin, gnawing on the trunks and killing at least five trees. The National Park Service had to find a way to preserve the trees without harming the beavers. They placed protective…

Among the items Captain Zebulon Pike sent to President Thomas Jefferson from the western United States was a pair of grizzly bear cubs. Jefferson kept them in a garden on the south side of the White House for a short time before sending the animals…