Articles

Ask most people what Supreme Court case ended public school segregation and they will say, “Brown vs. Board of Education.” That is would be correct… for most of the country. But, for citizens in the federally-controlled District of Columbia another case would be more important: Bolling vs. Sharpe, a case filed on behalf of eleven African American parents whose children had been denied enrollment at D.C.'s John Phillip Sousa Junior High School on the basis of race. 

In 1903, just weeks before Orville and Wilbur Wright successfully flew their Wright flyer in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, Smithsonian secretary Samuel Langley launched a daring, government-backed attempt to fly a motorized craft off a houseboat in the Potomac River. Langley's Aerodrome promptly crashed, but — much to the Wright Brothers' dismay — that didn't stop the Smithsonian from crediting Langley with creating the first motorized, manned craft “capable of flight.”

So where do you think Hall of Fame quarterback Joe Namath made his professional football debut? Shea Stadium in New York? Wrong. Fenway Park in Boston? Wrong again. D.C. Stadium in Washington? Nice try, but no. The correct answer is George Washington High School in Alexandria, Virginia.

Repeal Day, December 5, 1933, was a day of wild celebration. The 18th Amendment was repealed, ending the great experiment known as Prohibition. Booze could finally start flowing again (legally) across the country and Americans were eager to imbibe. But, as kegs were tapped and bottles were uncorked from coast to coast, one place was left out of the party: Washington, D.C.

The year is 1943. You’re new to the area and looking for a place to live that’s close enough to the city that the commute to your government job won’t be completely terrible. The war is going on and Washington is buzzing with activity. Where are you going to live? Well, if you were looking in Arlington, there’s a good chance you might end up in the new Fairlington neighborhood.

When Alan Lomax and the Library of Congress began recording Woody Guthrie in Washington in 1940, they preserved a body of songs and stories that launched Guthrie’s career and helped seed the folk revival that produced Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and a generation of protest singers

The holiday season is pretty busy for the United States Post Office -- lots of letters and packages going all over the country, from coast to coast. And we're all familiar with the warnings that tell us to mail our items early if we want to guarantee delivery by Christmas. Well, apparently D.C. residents weren't heeding the warnings back in 1921. So the U.S.P.S. called in the big fella to get the point across.

Washington doesn't usually get mentioned in the pantheon of great American music cities but we've had our moments. One of them was Sunday, November 28, 1965, when Bob Dylan played the Washington Coliseum. But the real story that day wasn't the music. It was an iconic photograph.

Yarrow Mamout — a West African who survived the Middle Passage, won his freedom, and became one of early Washington’s most remarkable figures — left a rare portrait of early Georgetown. 

In one of the more creative publicity stunts D.C. has ever seen, the Curtis Bros. Furniture Company commissioned Bassett Furniture to construct a giant chair in Anacostia. Then, the company then convinced a local model to live in a glass apartment atop the chair for seven weeks in the summer of 1960.

Thirty years before Houston's Astrodome became "the eighth wonder of the world" in 1965, Washington Redskins owner George Preston Marshall hired an architect to design a climate-controlled, 70,000 seat, all-weather stadium to be located in the District. Never built, the domed stadium would have featured a retractable roof made of steel and glass, tiered seating and flexibility to accommodate ice hockey, track, baseball, swimming or boxing in addition to Redskins football.

Was the father of our country a deadbeat book borrower? Apparently so. In April of 2010, a New York Society Library employee stumbled across the long lost fourteen-volume collection, Common Debates but, the collection was missing a volume. A check of the old circulation ledger proved that volume #12 had last been checked out by George Washington October 5, 1789 — and never returned.