Virginia

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.

30 years ago, FBI agents descended upon a cozy corner of Arlington to arrest one of the most destructive spy-turned-moles in United States history. For nearly a decade, career CIA officer Aldrich “Rick” Ames fed some of his agency’s most sensitive intelligence to the Soviet Union—a betrayal that compromised dozens of agents and led to the execution of at least ten.

Hercules Posey is considered one of America's first celebrity chefs. He was enslaved to George Washington during his presidency but ultimately able to make his escape. The details of his story haven't always been so clear though.

War is hell, so they say.  But nobody told Washington's elite in July 1861, when politicians armed with picnic baskets and champagne came to watch the first battle of the Civil War, and nearly got killed as a result.

After serving as Martha Washington's ladies' maid for most of her life, Ona Judge escaped from slavery in 1796. While with the family in Philadelphia, she boarded a ship headed north to Portsmouth, New Hampshire. For years she would evade efforts by President Washington to return her to bondage at Mount Vernon.

Walking through DC, you may notice faded fallout shelter signs marking buildings.  They are some of the last clues of a historic past when the federal government designated thousands of shelters throughout DC to save Washingtonians from a nuclear apocalypse. But would they have worked?

You know Neoclassical architecture.  But do you know why Brutalism came to D.C.?  Discover how a time of changing architectural styles paved the way for Brutalism to dominate D.C.'s federal buildings.   

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.”

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!