Thanks to a sizeable gift from a man who loves history, the Washington Monument may re-open as early as next summer. The 555-foot obelisk was damaged during a magnitude-5.8 earthquake in August 2011. The monument has cracks up to an inch wide, missing mortar, and other structural damage, and has been closed to visitors since [...]
Many of us have tried counting the rings on the stump of a tree to see how old the tree is. Did you know you can also count the rings on the scale of a fish? As a fish’s scales get larger, you can see lines, or rings, that grow on each individual scale. Those [...]
The painting above by John Trumbull is a famous image called Declaration of Independence, July 4th, 1776. It shows our founding fathers, together in the same room, preparing to sign the document that would forever separate our new country from the British Empire. But did you know that historians aren’t quite sure that all the [...]
The job of representing Americans in Washington, D.C., is one we all know well. The men and women elected to Congress are faces we see on the news and names we read in the paper regularly. But there are many other paths to a rewarding job in the the fast-paced, high-pressure center of the American [...]
Washington, D.C., trivia buffs might be excited to answer a question about the first president to spend his presidency in the completed White House (Thomas Jefferson, for those of you playing at home), but could they tell you where George Washington and John Adams lived during most of their presidencies? Our first two presidents lived [...]
