Washington at the Start of the Civil War

Our tale beings with an ebook. I subscribe to Early Bird Books’ daily emails of discounted ebooks. Friday they usually send out a multi-category sale, and on Sundays there’s usually a history-specific sale. At some point along they way, they offered Lucinda Prout Janke’s A Guide to Civil War Washington, DC, a book that isContinue reading “Washington at the Start of the Civil War”

Women Playing Baseball in the 1910s

Recently while digging around on the Library of Congress website I found a series of photographs of young women playing baseball. The photos were undated; they had a range between 1909 and 1923, nothing more specific. The uniforms resembled those worn by Ida Schnall’s New York Female Giants in 1913, though without the stitched logoContinue reading “Women Playing Baseball in the 1910s”

Revisiting the Washington That Never Was

You haven’t lived until you’ve digitally clipped mid-19th-century cursive from a scan of a faded and dirty print. This is B.F. Smith’s landscape of Washington, showing projected improvements in the capital city — the Washington Monument, a stone bridge across the Washington City Canal — from 1852. I found this on the Library of CongressContinue reading “Revisiting the Washington That Never Was”

The Washington That Never Was

While looking through the Library of Congress’ website yesterday, I found this vintage 1852 image of Washington, DC, done by the same company that did the map of Baltimore of 1868. “Oh, wow,” I said. “This is cool. There’s the Smithsonian Castle, designed by James Renwick. There’s Trinity Episcopal, also designed by Renwick. There’s theContinue reading “The Washington That Never Was”