Articles

Vince Lombardi wasn’t planning to continue coaching after he resigned as head coach with the Green Bay Packers. Instead, he was going to get away from that stress-filled lifestyle and move into a general manager position with the Packers. “I’m still a young man, but I doubt I would ever go back to coaching,” Lombardi said when he moved to the front office after the 1967 season. After just a year as general manager, he found himself longing to be on the sidelines again. “I’m certainly getting a little itchy,” Lombardi admitted in August of 1968. Soon enough, this itch overcame his life. He found his way to the nation's capital and transformed the Washington Redskins on and off the field.

An unsung hero from D.C. history has received a much-deserved spotlight in Tempestuous Elements, a new play at Arena Stage about visionary educator Anna Julia Cooper. We spoke to two of the people who helped bring the history to life: Otis Ramsey-Zöe, the play’s dramaturg, and Vanessa Dalpiaz, Arena Stage’s Artistic Development Fellow. Otis and Vanessa walk us through notable moments from Dr. Cooper’s life and discuss her legacy in D.C.

In the 1960s, the D.C. area's most exclusive music scene may not have been in the city's downtown clubs. It may have been behind prison walls at Lorton Reformatory. Year after year, jazz royalty including Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra, Ray Charles and others came to Lorton and gave free concerts for inmates. The brainchild of two prison chaplains, the Lorton Jazz Festival was more than just entertainment. As co-organizer, Father Carl Breitfeller put it, “Jazz is a definite art form and an aid to rehabilitation...it is a reminder to the inmate that he is a human being.”

The Underground Railroad has deeper ties to the Washington DC area than many know. Escaped slaves are believed to have used the burial vault at Mount Zion Cemetery in Georgetown as a hiding place during their journey to freedom.

One of D.C.’s most popular eateries is Busboys and Poets, a bookstore-cafe with locations all over the city. The name honors one busboy-poet in particular who has surprising ties to D.C.: Langston Hughes.  

In the U.S., we’re used to seeing recycled British names. It often feels a little anticlimactic to learn that a British colonist simply lifted the name of their hometown—Kensington, Cambridge, Salisbury, Westminster, Essex, Arlington, the list goes on—and slapped it onto whatever colony, town, or road they wanted to claim. However, the state of Maryland may be able to claim a rare distinction: lending its name to a location in Great Britain, not vice versa.

You might think today is rough, but if people lived in the DMV 35 million years ago, they would have faced a cosmic apocalypse in their very own backyards.

D.C. may have been built by humans, but before there were people anywhere, the region was home to some seriously spectacular prehistoric creatures. Meet five of our favorites!

If you were a western settler in the 1870s looking for a home where the buffalo roamed, you might have had a hard time finding one.  Homes on the range saw ever-dwindling numbers of buffalo (officially known as American bison), due to systematic campaigns of extermination that targeted not only bison, but gray wolves and cougars as well. Enter William Temple Hornaday, a hunter and taxidermist who witnessed the near extinction of the bison and decided that “preservation . . . is an imperative duty, for otherwise it will be too late.”

"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.

Those who live in Maryland may be familiar with Goatman, the half-goat, half-man creature. Perhaps you have heard that he was the result of a science experiment gone wrong, or maybe you've heard of his violent nature. The popularity of this folklore begs us to ask, how did the tale of this local beast from Clinton spread all over the state? 

Those who think that the “Exorcist stairs” are the spookiest landmark in Georgetown clearly haven’t heard of the Laurie family. In the nineteenth century, in a townhouse where 3327 N Street NW stands today, two women known as “the Witches of Georgetown” were talking to ghosts and making pianos levitate. Or, at least, that’s what legend tells us.