I have recently looked at some of the aspects of Prohibition on the Hill, looking at the raids of 1931, as well as the production of liquor here. That still leaves one important aspect of the alcohol trade unexplained: The sale thereof. Most was, of course, sold under the counter at establishments that sold “near [...]

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You’ve all heard the joke: How do you make a small fortune in the [art/wine/horse] business? Start with a large one. Well, add another one to that: The early real estate business on Capitol Hill. No one better exemplifies this than Thomas Law, who arrived here in 1795 with a large fortune — and ended [...]

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One of the ways I try to keep my tour groups’ eyes open is to have them search for something in a monument or memorial we are visiting. My personal favorite is the – repaired — error on the engraving of the Second Inaugural Address of the Lincoln Memorial, which can see in the picture [...]

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At the end of last week, I was sent an edited copy of the scandal book, with a number of questions and statements needing clarification. Most of them were quite simple, but one took me a couple of hours. And although there was, in the end, little need to change any words, I did discover [...]

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With the manuscript of my book at the editors, I can once again look at some piece of arcana of Capitol Hill history. And little is more arcane than what I discovered while researching something completely different: The electric scoreboard. In those long-ago days before TV – or even radio – the only way to [...]

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As I am still in the final stretch of finishing up my scandal book of Capitol Hill, it seems appropriate that this weeks rerun is one of the scandals that will feature prominently in my book. Look for new columns starting in two weeks, and the book to be released Friday, April 13. With all [...]

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Over the winter holidays, I will be going on hiatus from my usual Lost Capitol Hill columns, as I will be working on my book on scandals of the Hill. In the meantime, I have dug out some of my old columns. While in my usual columns about lost Capitol Hill I write about landmarks [...]

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Marches on Washington are today a standard tactic of those seeking to change the opinions of the leaders in DC. Whether to denounce war, or attempt to right economic wrongs — or simply to attract attention, large numbers of people walking great distances has been an American institution since, well, 1894. In that year, a [...]

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The most difficult part in writing is deciding what to leave out. So often, a wonderful sidelight gets deleted at the last minute because there’s simply no room for it, especially if it does not really add to the main story. Fortunately, there are always other venues to write about the issue thus deleted — [...]

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