Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C., is the capital of the United States and a federal district rather than a state. Established under the Residence Act of 1790, it was created along the Potomac River as a permanent seat for the national government. The city was named for George Washington, while the district was called Columbia—an eighteenth-century poetic name for the United States derived from Christopher Columbus. Its landscape is shaped by the Potomac and Anacostia rivers and its government buildings, monuments, memorials, and public parks.
Washington was one of the nation’s earliest planned cities. In 1791, George Washington selected Pierre Charles L’Enfant to design a capital of broad avenues, open public spaces, and prominent sites for the Capitol and President’s House. His plan placed diagonal avenues across a traditional street grid, creating the circles and public squares that continue to distinguish the city. The federal government moved there in 1800, and the capital was rebuilt after British forces burned many of its public buildings during the War of 1812.
Recent Articles
Vietnam Women’s Memorial
Near the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall in Washington, D.C., three bronze women care for a wounded serviceman. One supports his body while concentrating on his injuries. Another kneels nearby holding his helmet, while the third stands and looks toward the sky, as though searching for help. Together, their expressions and postures convey the compassion, anxiety, […]
Mary McLeod Bethune Memorial
During our visits to Washington, D.C., we often came across monuments that introduced us to people whose stories deserved to be better known. Mary McLeod Bethune was certainly one of them. Born in South Carolina in 1875, the fifteenth of seventeen children and the daughter of parents who had been enslaved, she built an extraordinary […]
The Kennedy Gravesite at Arlington National Cemetery
Among the thousands of graves at Arlington National Cemetery, the gravesite of President John F. Kennedy and Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis has become one of the cemetery’s most visited places. President Kennedy was buried at Arlington on November 25, 1963, just three days after his assassination in Dallas. Jacqueline Kennedy had chosen the location after […]
