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British scientist James Smithson left a fortune to the country he so admired but had never visited. His gift founded the Smithsonian Institution and built the Smithsonian Castle. Today, the castle's distinct Romanesque facade glows warmly against the cool marble that dominates the National Mall. Yet the story of the stones is just as remarkable as that of the building that they grace. It was a boom-bust ride for the Seneca Quarry--the source of the...
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An effervescent history of beer brewing in the American capital city.
Imagine the jubilation of thirsty citizens in 1796 when the Washington Brewery-the city's first brewery-opened. Yet the English-style ales produced by the early breweries in the capital and in nearby Arlington and Alexandria sat heavy on the tongue in the oppressive Potomac summers. By the 1850s, an influx of German immigrants gave a frosty reprieve to their new home in the form...
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Walt Whitman was already famous for Leaves of Grass when he journeyed to Washington at the height of the Civil War to find his brother George, a Union officer wounded at the Battle of Fredericksburg. Eventually, Whitman would serve as a volunteer "hospital missionary"-making more than six hundred hospital visits and serving over eighty thousand sick and wounded soldiers in the next three years. With the 1865 publication of Drum-Taps, Whitman became...
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Even in the city where the Eighteenth Amendment was passed, the party went on-a history of bootleggers and speakeasies in the nation's capital. Despite the passage of the Volstead Act, it was estimated that in 1929, bootleggers brought twenty-two thousand gallons of whiskey, moonshine, and other spirits into Washington, DC's speakeasies-every week. The bathtub gin-swilling capital dwellers made the most of Prohibition. This rollicking history brims...
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