DC History

A recreational mapmaker has received a grant from the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities to compile a meticulous anthology of all the tunnels in the District — subway and freight rail tunnels, pedestrian passageways, underground…

When Seng Luangrath was 12 and living in a refugee camp in Thailand, the trauma of exile was still fresh. She had grown up in neighboring Laos in a multigenerational household with a grandmother who taught her to cook sticky rice and other…

There’s a kind of sport in identifying the neighborhood name for any particular spot in Washington — a sport played by realtors, developers, and planning geeks. Sadly (or happily), it’s all for naught; there are no official neighborhoods in…

In 1942, a group of university professors, doctors, lawyers and other black professionals in Washington wanted to get together on weekends and play poker. But they had a problem. Not only did segregation in the District bar them from…

WASHINGTON — Why should anyone care about a restaurant that closed 24 years ago? In the case of one Duke Zeibert’s, it’s because the restaurant holds a unique place in the history of the nation’s capital — and, to an extent, a unique place…

Two centuries before Georgetown was entertaining the notion of $1,500/square-foot condos, it was an industrial port town where the brick streets and alley dwellings were frowned upon and enslaved and free Black populations lived in close…

After about 150 years of being a beacon of spirituality and social justice in the Shaw community, Lincoln Temple United Church of Christ will be closing its doors because one of the city’s oldest African American congregations is…

John Kelly’s Aug. 28 Metro column on the efforts of Southern segregationists to expand their reach into the D.C. area, “In the 1960s, a daring effort brought down a Maryland White Citizens’ Council,” noted that many Citizens Councils “had…

If only this house could talk. For 180 years the small, stone “miracle” has witnessed the passing of history on the southwest corner of 17th Street and what is now Constitution Avenue. Battered by time, nature, and neglect, the onetime…

NoMa has a name drawn from a buried piece of D.C.’s African American history for a new large park in the works. The new 2.5-acre park adjacent to the Metropolitan Branch Trail just north of the New York Avenue bridge in NoMa will be called…