Washington D.C.
Roosevelt Memorial
A 7.5-acre site, the memorial depicts the 12 pivotal years of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's presidency through a series of four outdoor gallery rooms. The rooms feature ten bronze sculptures depicting President Roosevelt, Eleanor Roosevelt and events from the Great Depression and World War II. The park-like setting includes waterfalls and quiet pools amidst a meandering wall of reddish Dakota granite, where Roosevelt's inspiring words are carved. It is the first memorial in Washington, DC purposely designed to be totally wheelchair accessible. The waterfalls throughout the memorial are there for several reasons. First, they are symbolic of FDR’s connection to and love of water (he was Assistant Secretary of the Navy during World War I). Second, they block out some of the noise from the airport located directly across the Potomac River. Roosevelt was the first President to make full use of the radio, the first to fly in a plane, the first to appoint a woman to his Cabinet, the first to appoint a Press Secretary, and the first to leave the country in a time of war. |
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Embassy Row
DC Embassy Row is the informal name for a street or area of a city in which embassies or other diplomatic installations are mostly concentrated. Washington's Embassy Row lies along Massachusetts Ave, N.W., and its cross streets between Thomas Circle and Ward Circle, however the vast majority of embassies are found between Scott Circle and Wisconsin Avenue. Washington, DC has more than 175 foreign embassies, residences, chanceries, and diplomatic missions. Less than half of the embassies of Washington DC are actually located along Embassy Row. |
Washington National Cathedral
On January 6, 1893, Congress granted a charter (incorporation papers) to the Protestant Episcopal Cathedral Foundation of the District of Columbia, allowing it to establish a cathedral and institutions of higher learning. Signed by President Benjamin Harrison, this charter is the birth certificate of Washington National Cathedral. Although it is the home of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington and it has a local congregation of more than 1,200 members, it is also considered to be a national house of prayer for all people. The Cathedral is known as Washington National Cathedral, though its official name is the Cathedral Church of St. Peter and St. Paul. The Cathedral is the sixth largest in the world, second largest in the United States. The top of the tower is the highest point in DC. |
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The White House
The White House, one of the most recognizable buildings in Washington, DC, was designed by James Hoban, an Irish-born and-trained architect who won a competition organized by President George Washington and Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson in 1792. The competitions were held to determine who would design the nation's two most important buildings, the President's House and the Capitol. Construction began when the first cornerstone was laid in October of 1792. Although President Washington oversaw the construction of the house, he never lived in it. It was not until 1800, when the White House was nearly completed, that its first residents, President John Adams and his wife, Abigail, moved in. President John Adams, elected in 1796 as the second President, was the first resident of the White House. While James Madison was President from 1809 to 1817, the White House was torched by the British in the War of 1812. Although the fire was put out by a summer thunderstorm, all that remained were the outside, charred walls and the interior brick walls. Madison brought Hoban back to restore the mansion, which took three years. It was during this construction that the house was painted white. |
Smithsonian Museums
The birth of the Smithsonian Institution can be traced to the acceptance of James Smithson’s legacy, willed to the United States in 1826. Smithson died in 1829, and in 1836, President Andrew Jackson informed Congress of the gift, which it accepted. In 1838, Smithson's legacy, which totaled more than $500,000, was delivered to the United States Mint and entered the Treasury. After eight years, in 1846, the Smithsonian Institution was established. Founded in 1846, the Smithsonian is the world's largest museum and research complex, consisting of 19 museums and galleries, the National Zoological Park, and nine research facilities. |
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Newseum
The Newseum is an interactive museum of news and journalism. The seven-level, 250,000-square-foot museum features 15 theaters and 14 galleries. The Newseum's Berlin Wall Gallery includes the largest display of sections of the Berlin Wall outside of Germany. The Today's Front Pages Gallery presents daily front pages from more than 80 international newspapers. Other galleries present topics including news history, the September 11 attacks, the First Amendment, world press freedom and the history of the Internet, TV and radio. |
U.S. Capitol BuildingThe United States Capitol is the seat of the United States Congress, the legislative branch of the U.S. federal government. Though not at the geographic center of the Federal District, the Capitol is the origin point at which the District’s four meet, and around which the city was laid out.
Like the principal buildings of the executive and judicial branches, the Capitol is built in a distinctive neoclassical style and has a white exterior. Though both its east and west elevations are formally referred to as fronts, only the east front was intended for the reception of visitors and dignitaries |
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Library of Congress
The Library of Congress was established by an act of Congress in 1800 when President John Adams signed a bill providing for the transfer of the seat of government from Philadelphia to the new capital city of Washington. Established with $5,000 appropriated by the legislation, the original library was housed in the new Capitol until August 1814, when invading British troops set fire to the Capitol Building, burning and pillaging the contents of the small library. Within a month, retired President Thomas Jefferson offered his personal library as a replacement. Today's Library of Congress is an unparalleled world resource. The collection of more than 158 million items includes more than 36 million cataloged books and other print materials in 460 languages; more than 69 million manuscripts; the largest rare book collection in North America; and the world's largest collection of legal materials, films, maps, sheet music and sound recordings. |
Supreme Court
After the federal government moved to Washington, D.C., the court had no permanent meeting location until 1810. When the architect Benjamin Latrobe built the second U.S. Senate chamber directly on top of first US Senate chamber, the Supreme Court took up residence in what is now referred to as the Old Supreme Court Chamber from 1810 through 1860. It remained in the Capitol until 1935, with the exception of a period from 1812 to 1819, during which the Court was absent from Washington because of the British invasion and destruction of the Capitol in the War of 1812 In 1929, Chief Justice William Howard Taft argued successfully for the Court to have its own headquarters to distance itself from Congress as an independent branch of government, but did not live to see it built. The court was finally designed by Cass Gilbert, who created many other structures in the United States. It was completed in 1935. |
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Old Post Office Pavilion
The Old Post Office Pavilion, also known as Old Post Office and Clock Tower and officially renamed the Nancy Hanks Center in 1983, is a historic building located at 1100 Pennsylvania Avenue NW in Washington, D.C. Completed in 1899, it was used as the city's main post office until 1914. At the time of its completion, the Post Office Building contained the largest uninterrupted enclosed space in the city. Its clock tower reached 315 feet (96 m) into the air. It was also the city's first building to have a steel frame structure, and the first to be built with electrical wiring incorporated into its design. The structure featured elevators with cages of highly intricate wrought iron, a glass covered atrium and mezzanine level, and floors, moldings, railings, and wainscoting made of marble. The atrium was 196 feet (60 m) high, and 10 floors of balconies looked out onto the space (which provided interior light in an era when indoor lighting was not common). It boasted more than 39,000 interior electric lights, and its own electrical generator. |
Jefferson Memorial
The Thomas Jefferson Memorial, modeled after the Pantheon of Rome, is America's foremost memorial to our third president. As an original adaptation of Neoclassical architecture, it is a key landmark in the monumental core of Washington, DC The circular, colonnaded structure in the classic style was introduced to this country by Thomas Jefferson. The present-day location at the Tidal Basin was selected in 1937. The site caused considerable public criticism because it resulted in the removal of Japanese flowering cherry trees from the Tidal Basin. Further controversy surrounded the selection of the design of the Memorial. The Commission of Fine Arts objected to the pantheon design because it would compete with the Lincoln Memorial. The Thomas Jefferson Commission took the design controversy to President Franklin D. Roosevelt who preferred the pantheon design and gave his permission to proceed. On November 15, 1939, a ceremony was held in which President Roosevelt laid the cornerstone of the Memorial. |
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World War II Memorial
The National World War II Memorial is a national memorial dedicated to Americans who served in the armed forces and as civilians during World War II. Consisting of 56 pillars and a pair of small triumphal arches surrounding a plaza and fountain, it is located on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., on the former site of the Rainbow Pool at the eastern end of the Reflecting Pool, between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument. The final design consists of 56 granite pillars, each 17 feet tall, arranged in a semicircle around a plaza with two 43-foot triumphal arches on opposite sides. Two-thirds of the 7.4-acre site is landscaping and water. Each pillar is inscribed with the name of one of the 48 U.S. states of 1945, as well as the District of Columbia, the Alaska Territory, Territory of Hawaii, the Commonwealth of the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Guam, American Samoa, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. The northern arch is inscribed with “Atlantic” ; the southern one, “Pacific.” |
Lincoln Memorial
The Lincoln Memorial is an American national monument built to honor the 16th President of the United States, Abraham Lincoln. It is located on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., across from the Washington Monument. The exterior of the Memorial echoes a classic Greek temple and features Yule marble from Colorado. The structure measures 189.7 by 118.5 feet and is 99 feet tall. It is surrounded by a peristyle of 36 fluted Doric columns, one for each of the 36 states in the Union at the time of Lincoln's death, and two columns in-antis at the entrance behind the colonnade. The columns stand 44 feet tall with a base diameter of 7.5 feet. Each column is built from 12 drums including the capital. The columns, like the exterior walls and facades, are inclined slightly toward the building's interior. This is to compensate for perspective distortions which would otherwise make the memorial appear to bulge out at the top when compared with the bottom, a common feature of Ancient Greek architecture. |
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Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial
The street address for the memorial is 1964 Independence Ave., SW, Washington, D.C., with "1964" chosen as a direct reference to the 1964 Civil Rights Act, a milestone in the Civil Rights movement in which King played an important role. The memorial is located on a 4-acre site in West Potomac Park that borders the Tidal Basin, southwest of the National Mall. The memorial is near the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial and is intended to create a visual "line of leadership" from the Lincoln Memorial, on whose steps King gave his "I Have a Dream" speech at the March on Washington, to the Jefferson Memorial. The centerpiece for the memorial is based on a line from King's "I Have A Dream" speech: "Out of a mountain of despair, a stone of hope." A 30 feet (9.1 m)-high relief of King named the "Stone of Hope" stands past two other pieces of granite that symbolize the "mountain of despair." Visitors figuratively "pass through" the Mountain of Despair on the way to the Stone of Hope, symbolically "moving through the struggle as Dr. King did during his life." |
Ford's Theatre
Ford's Theater will forever be associated with the events of April 14, 1865, when President Abraham Lincoln, seated in Box 7, was assassinated by actor John Wilkes Booth. Booth's sympathies lay with the Confederacy, and he launched a conspiracy to murder Lincoln and other top government officials, including Secretary of State William Seward. Out of his motley group of plotters, only Booth succeeded. His single shot derringer delivered the fatal bullet behind Lincoln's left ear. He then stabbed Major Rathbone in the left arm and leaped to the stage, making his escape on horseback into southern Maryland. Booth was eventually trapped in Port Royal, Virginia on April 26, killed by a shot from a pursuing soldier. Lincoln was rushed across the street to the house of a tailor, William Petersen, where he lay through the night, attended by Army surgeons who had been in in the Ford's audience. The president died at 7:22 a.m. the following morning. |
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Washington Monument
The Washington Monument is an obelisk on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., built to commemorate George Washington, once commander-in-chief of the early Continental Army and the first American president. Construction of the monument began in 1848, was halted from 1854 to 1877, and was finally completed in 1884. Construction continued until 1854, when donations ran out. The next year, Congress voted to appropriate $200,000 ($70.3 million in 2012) to continue the work, but rescinded before the money could be spent. This reversal came because of a new policy the society had adopted in 1849. It had agreed, after a request from some Alabamians, to encourage all states and territories to donate commemorative stones that could be fitted into the interior walls. It was just one commemorative stone that started the events that stopped the Congressional appropriation and ultimately construction altogether. In the early 1850s, Pope Pius IX contributed a block of marble. In March 1854, members of the anti-Catholic, nativist American Party, better known as the “Know-Nothings,” stole the Pope's stone as a protest and supposedly threw it into the Potomac (it was replaced in 1982). Congress immediately rescinded its $200,000 contribution. |
Korean War Veterans Memorial
The Korean War Veterans Memorial commemorates the sacrifices of the 5.8 million Americans who served in the U.S. armed services during the three-year period of the Korean War. The war was one of the most hard fought in our history. During its relatively short duration from June 25, 1950 to July 27, 1953, 54,246 Americans died in support of their country. The 19 stainless steel statues are approximately seven feet tall and represent an ethnic cross section of America. The advance party has 14 Army, 3 Marine, 1 Navy and 1 Air Force members. The statues stand in patches of Juniper bushes and are separated by polished granite strips, which give a semblance of order and symbolize the rice paddies of Korea. The troops wear ponchos covering their weapons and equipment. The ponchos seem to blow in the cold winds of Korea. The statues are identified below: The Mural Wall consists of 41 panels extending 164 feet. Over 2,400 photographs of the Korean War were obtained from the National Archives. |
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Vietnam War Memorial
The Memorial Wall, designed by Maya Lin, is made up of two gabbro walls 246 feet 9 inches long. The walls are sunk into the ground, with the earth behind them. At the highest tip (the apex where they meet), they are 10.1 feet high, and they taper to a height of 8 inches at their extremities. When a visitor looks upon the wall, his or her reflection can be seen simultaneously with the engraved names, which is meant to symbolically bring the past and present together. One wall points toward the Washington Monument, the other in the direction of the Lincoln Memorial. Each wall has 72 panels, 70 listing names (numbered 1E through 70E and 70W through 1W) and 2 very small blank panels at the extremities. There is a pathway along the base of the Wall, where visitors may walk. |