Washington, D.C.

On July 23, 1942, Washingtonians packed Griffith Stadium to the gills for a special “Battle of Music” between African American jazz legend Louis Armstrong and white saxophonist Charlie Barnet. In segregated Washington of the 1940s, such an organized interracial competition was a big event and few people — especially in the black community that surrounded the stadium — wanted to miss the “musical fisticuffs.”

For decades Georgetown University students have plotted daring night raids on Healy Hall, removing the clock’s hands as a prank that spawned nicknamed crews, secret hideouts, and tall tales. Administration fines and alarms haven’t stopped the tradition. Every few years, it seems, the clock goes quiet and a new heist becomes campus legend.

You can hear the rumble from miles away, a deep roar of engines joined together for a cause. This Memorial Day weekend, thousands of motorcyclists will ride in unison across Memorial Bridge, a moving force of memory and action for POW's and soldiers listed as Missing in Action. Rolling Thunder, as the demonstration is called, has been a Washington Memorial Day tradition since 1988. But do you know the history behind it?

The nation’s capital is chock full of statues, memorials, monuments, historic markers, and museums. Some are world-famous, some have been controversial, and some have been forgotten altogether. Horatio Greenough’s sculpture of George Washington has been all of these things – and more.

May 17, 1973 began an enthralling summer of reality television in Washington. That morning Senate Watergate Committee chairman Sam Ervin banged his gavel and launched hearings to investigate the details of the Watergate scandal, which had rocked the nation the previous June. Americans from coast to coast watched with great interest, trying to determine “what the President knew and when he knew it.” (Short answer: He knew a lot and he had known it for a long time.)

Nathaniel Hawthorne, author of The Scarlet Letter, visited Washington, D.C. in 1862, as the Capital was gearing up for war against the Confederacy. If you remember Hawthorne at all from school, you won’t be surprised to find he had a lot to say.

You know who was just too fabulous for Washington. D.C. to handle? Oscar Wilde. He caused quite a stir when he visited in the January of 1882 as part of a lecture tour on the “Philosophy of Aestheticism”.

Huddie William Ledbetter, known as Lead Belly, was a legendary folk and blues musician famed for his twelve‑string guitar virtuosity, powerful voice, and the many standards he popularized. His songs have been covered by artists from Bob Dylan to Led Zeppelin. But one of his lesser known works hits closest to home: "Bourgeois Blues," a searing indictment of racial segregation in Washington, D.C.

During World War II, the We Will Never Die – a Mass Memorial to the Two Million Dead of Europe pageant at Constitution Hall helped bring truth to power about the horrors of the Holocaust. 

As the British attacked and burned Washington, D.C. in August 1914, George Robert Gleig found time to take in the sights and form some opinions.

On April 16, 1862 Congress passed the District of Columbia Compensated Emancipation Act, freeing more than 3,100 people in the capital months before the Emancipation Proclamation and spawning an annual Emancipation Day celebration that was revived in 2005.

In April 1848, more than 76 enslaved people in Washington, D.C. slipped aboard The Pearl under the cover of darkness and the small schooner set sail down the Potomac. Backed by abolitionists including Daniel Drayton, the voyage promised hope but calm winds and betrayal turned it into one of the most dramatic failed escapes in American history.