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One of the most remembered war correspondents was also the youngest reporter in the Civil War, George Alfred Townsend. Born in 1841, Townsend’s reports on the Battle of Five Forks and the Lincoln assassination gained him wide recognition, but before he had the chance to write those, Townsend visited the occupied city of Alexandria.

Washington, D.C. is a city rich in history with many stories to tell. Inevitably some of those stories take on a life of their own, even if the facts don’t necessarily back them up. For example, the story that the term “lobbyist” was created by President Ulysses S.

It may be hard to picture now, but the National Mall was once home to a lot of commercial and industrial development. Perhaps the most notable — if also maligned — site was a railroad station belonging to the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad.

We have the states of Maryland and Virginia to thank for the land that created Washington, D.C. It was through their cession of territory — 69 square miles from Maryland and 31 square miles from Virginia — that Congress was able to establish a permanent home for a federal government on the banks of the Potomac River in 1801.

The Vietnam War left a number of indelible images burned in our collective psyche, but few encapsulated the anti-war movement here at home more than Marc Riboud's 1967 photograph of a flower girl standing before a row of bayonet-wielding soldiers in front of the Pentagon.

Muhammad Ali twice defended his heavyweight boxing title at the old Capital Centre arena in Landover, Maryland.

There are two things that all D.C. residents love: the first lady and the performing arts. It’s no surprise then that in the capital, “First Lady of American Theatre” Helen Hayes is an icon. Born in 1900 in Washington D.C., Hayes’s career spanned nearly eighty years.

In the years leading up to the Civil War, the debate over the future of slavery raged through the halls of Congress. Abolitionists in the North, however, had little faith that their fight could be won through political discourse.

Summer blockbusters are typically films driven by special effects and large set pieces with plots that involve major threats to America or the Earth in general. What better location to feature all these elements than Washington, D.C.?

Nixon, a career politician known for his rather stilted mannerisms and stoic demeanor, was seen as humorless and uncaring by the counterculture. As a result, he was the butt of many jokes. Some of the nation’s counterculture writers and artists mused what it would be like if Nixon ever took LSD.