While other American cities are more often associated with Irish-American culture, Irish identity and history runs deep in Washington’s DNA. Case in point: Matilda Tone. The widow of Irish rebel Theobald Wolfe Tone, Matilda spent thirty years living in Georgetown, where she compiled and edited her martyred husband’s papers into a book that would become a “sacred scripture” of Irish nationalism after its 1826 publication in D.C.
On July 4th, 1970, nearly 1,000 hippies traveled to the National Mall to disrupt Nixon's Independence Day Celebration. The "culture clash" ended with naked hippies, an overturned truck, dozens of arrests, and tear gas.
The Lindens, a 1754 Georgian mansion, is the oldest home in Washington D.C. However, it began its life in a small town in Massachusetts. Thanks to the efforts of a wealthy antique-collecting couple, The Lindens had a second chance at life.
In the early 19th-century, Washington, D.C. had a problem: what to do with their population of the mentally ill. Dorothea Dix, a healthcare reform crusader from Massachusetts, came to their aid and, with a team of politicians and doctors, catalyzed the construction of what would come to be known as St. Elizabeths.
This map reveals the roadways that existed in Washington, D.C. before its development into the capital city (and before it was a city at all). Six of those roads are still in use today, and details of their history reveal the the central facets of early Washington life which busy D.C. residents no longer orbit, but whose trails we certainly follow.
In the 1840s, northern abolitionist Charles T. Torrey had had enough of intellectual debates and meetings, so he headed south and teamed up with Thomas Smallwood to free hundreds of slaves in the D.C. area. Following his arrest in 1844, Torrey was imprisoned in the Maryland Penitentiary where he would become a martyr for his cause.
You've heard of the Freemasons. You may have heard of the Illuminati. Secret societies are finding it harder to stay secret in our surveillance-saturated world. In 1864, a former schoolteacher from middle-of-nowhere Michigan arrived in the nation's capital. Justus Henry Rathbone sought to create a secret society that would heal the nation's divisions after the Civil War. There was just one thing. His not-so-secret society glowed in the national spotlight once presidents from Lincoln to FDR found out about it.
A needless debate over honor in the House of Representatives sparked the only fatal duel between two congressmen in American history. The killing of Rep. Jonathan Cilley triggered outrage across America and anti-dueling legislation. But did it end the practice altogether?
In 1942, the USSR sends a young woman, its most effective sniper, to the United States as a member of its delegation to President Roosevelt's International Youth Assembly. But she has a second reason for her trip: to entreat the Allies to open a second front in Europe. American observers, unfortunately, seem less interested in her rhetoric than the unflattering cut of her uniform.
In September 1978, Jimmy Carter brokered a peace agreement between Israel and Egypt, which has lasted over 40 years. Over nearly two weeks of tense negotiations, each side threatened to walk away from the table. But Carter used a combination of diplomacy and personal appeals to bring them back.
