Articles

In the summer of 1861 the Confederate States found themselves annoyed by the U.S.S. Pawnee, a gunboat that patrolled the Potomac and made it difficult for the southerners to receive supplies from northern sympathizers. Fortunately for the Confederates, Col. Richard Thomas Zarvona had a plan...

Nelson Mandela, who died December 5, 2013, was mourned worldwide as the leader who beat Apartheid and then worked to promote reconciliation and racial tolerance in South Africa. But just months after he was freed from a South African prison, Mandela created a sensation — and some tense, discomforting moments — when he visited the U.S. and met with then-President George H. W. Bush at the White House.

The Washington, D.C. area has plenty of monuments and grand statues, to be sure. But Takoma Park, Maryland, has one that stands out from the rest: A life-size bronze likeness of a rooster on a pedestal, which thrusts his feathered chest jauntily at passers-by, as if it owned the town. Which, in fact, he once did.

December 6, 1877 was a big day in local journalism as D.C.'s longest running local rag, The Washington Post, published its first issue. For three pennies readers got four pages of news. Sounds like a pretty good deal.

The 1971 T.C. Williams High School football team rolled to the Virginia state championship and united a divided Alexandria during a contentious school consolidation process. Their championship season inspired the Disney film Remember the Titans. But was the movie accurate?

On Oct. 5, 1964 President Lyndon B. Johnson and visiting Philippines President Diosdado Macapagal rode a 25-minute noontime parade through downtown Washington. It was an unremarkable presidential event except for one unsettling detail: the car in which they rode was the same customized black 1961 Lincoln in which President John F. Kennedy had been killed less than a year earlier.

During the Civil War Lincoln relied on War Department telegraph operators not just to send messages but to encode communications and break Confederate ciphers. Their work helped foil plots and protect plans, turning a small office next to the White House into the era's intelligence hub.

As the Civil War raged, Abraham Lincoln used the War Department telegraph office next to the White House as a wartime nerve center. He read intercepted messages, issued rapid orders to generals, and relied on telegraph operators as cryptographers to shape strategy in real time.

When we think of President John F. Kennedy, we picture him living in the White House with Jackie, Caroline and John Jr.  But for most of the time he spent in Washington — the years from 1946 through 1960 — he was a resident of the city’s Georgetown neighborhood.

The American Masters documentary "Jimi Hendrix: Hear My Train A Comin," includes never-before-aired film footage of a live Hendrix performance at the 1968 Miami Pop Festival, as well as a poignant clip of his final performance in Germany in September 1970, just 12 days before his death at age 27. Unlike the Miami show, rock music archivists have yet to discover any film record of the legendary guitarist's three performances in the Washington, D.C. area in 1967 and 1968, but those shows have become the stuff of local legend.

Velvet Underground singer and guitarist Lou Reed is best known as a lyrical chronicler of New York City's debached avant garde subculture of the 1960s. But Reed also could claim an intriguing distinction in the musical history of the nation's capital.  The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee once was called upon to provide musical entertainment at the White House, at the request of a visiting foreign head of state. 

When Orson Welles’ 1938 broadcast of the War of the Worlds hit the airwaves on WJV, Washington erupted with fear, rumors, and frantic calls. Panic spread through neighborhoods and newsrooms as listeners searched for confirmation, prompting officials to scramble with reassurances.