20th century

From 1920 to 1930, George Cassiday was a bootlegger for Congress. He sold alcohol to four out of every five members during Prohibition, and at one point had an office inside the House Office Building. After his arrest for possessing alcohol, Cassiday told his story in The Washington Post.

The battle lasted about half an hour, and when the smoke cleared, Captain Frank Whitehurst lay dead in a pool of his own blood on the deck of the Albert Nickel, a Baltimore oyster schooner. While Whitehurst met a fate avoided by most, the so called “Oyster Wars” had been brewing for more than 100 years prior to that fateful night on the Severn River.

For nearly two centuries, Maryland and Virginia were engaged in conflict over one of the region’s valuable resources — oysters. Full of inconsistent enforcement and rampant law-breaking, it took the president’s signature to end the Oyster Wars.

April 26, 1954, wasn’t an ordinary day at work for Dr. Richard Mulvaney. As McLean, Virginia’s first general practitioner, he treated all types of patients, but he’d never dealt with a situation like the one that awaited him at Franklin Sherman Elementary School that morning.

As the United States entered World War I, women became a vital part of the war effort. The Navy created a single unit of African-American Yeomanettes, which was assigned to Washington D.C.'s Navy Yard, and quickly made an impression.