Arielle Gordon

Arielle is a senior History-Political Science major and Journalism minor at Colorado College. She’s a native Marylander and she’s working from home with her collection of U.S. Presidents Pez dispensers on the shelf behind her. She can’t always decide which era of history she’d want to time travel to, but she’s less inclined to live in D.C. in the early 19^th century — purely because she doesn’t think she’d survive in an area with a greater mosquito population than 21^st century D.C.

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From July 4, 1798 to his death in 1799, George Washington served as Commander-in-Chief of the United States Army. Tensions with France were on the rise during the Quasi-War, so President John Adams appointed Washington to lead the nation’s armed forces.

For the first weeks of his presidency, Calvin Coolidge conducted business from a different iconic D.C. residence — the Willard Hotel. The Coolidges lived at the hotel while he was Vice President and they waited to move to the White House until Warren Harding’s family had time to move out after he died in office.

During the Civil War, the U.S. Capitol served stints as a military barracks, a bakery, and a hospital for wounded soldiers, all while the building was under construction. After the war, the bakery was dismantled and the soldiers left — well, all but one …

In 1849, future President Abraham Lincoln argued a case before the Supreme Court. He lost the case, but this was only the beginning of his conflicts with Chief Justice Roger Taney.

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.

From idea to completion, it took 105 years to build the Washington Monument and open it to the public. The elevator has quite a history of its own — used for construction, open for guests, closed for repairs...

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.