Qualla: Washington, D.C.

Washington, D.C.: Introduction

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

On the night of June 21, 1783, around 400 unpaid Continental Army veterans from Pennsylvania surrounded Independence Hall in Philadelphia and demanded their back pay from the Confederation Congress. The Pennsylvania state government, sympathetic to the soldiers, refused to call out the militia to disperse them. The Congress fled north to Princeton in the back of carriages. The Pennsylvania Mutiny made one thing unmistakably clear to the framers of the new American government: the federal capital had to be sovereign, controlled by no state. Seven years later, James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, and Alexander Hamilton sat down to dinner and worked out the bargain that put the new capital on the marshy banks of the Potomac, between Maryland and Virginia, near George Washington's plantation at Mount Vernon. Washington himself chose the exact site - ten miles square, diamond-shaped, including the existing port towns of Georgetown and Alexandria. The city the bargain produced has existed for 230 years and is still being argued over.

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Washington, D.C.: L'Enfant's Plan and the Burning of 1814

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Pierre Charles L'Enfant, a French-born engineer who had served on Washington's staff during the Revolution, drew the plan for the new city in 1791. L'Enfant proposed a baroque grid of diagonal avenues laid over a Cartesian street grid, with the Capitol and the President's House a...

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Washington, D.C.: Chocolate City

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Washington's African American history is as old as the city. Enslaved laborers built much of the original federal city; free Black communities grew up around the Navy Yard, in Foggy Bottom, and along U Street even before the Civil War. The District abolished slavery in April 1862...

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Washington, D.C.: The McMillan Plan and the New Deal

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

By 1900, L'Enfant's plan had been buried under a century of haphazard development. Slums occupied land near the Capitol. A railroad station sat on the National Mall. The Tidal Basin had not been built. Congress empaneled the Senate Park Commission, headed by Senator James McMilla...

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Washington, D.C.: April 1968 and What Followed

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

When Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on the evening of April 4, 1968, riots broke out at the intersection of 14th and U Streets within hours. The disturbances spread to 7th Street, H Street NE, and the Anacostia corridor. By the time President Johnson ordered the 82nd Air...

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Washington, D.C.: The Capital Today

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Modern Washington holds about 670,000 residents in 68 square miles, with a metropolitan area of 6.4 million spread across Maryland, Virginia, and West Virginia. The population is roughly 45 percent Black, 38 percent white non-Hispanic, 12 percent Hispanic, and 5 percent Asian, wi...

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