Category: History

Cemeteries, Parks, and Turning Lanes

This week we briefly touched on the topic of the history of New York’s Central Park in the course I am a teaching assistant for here at the University of Maryland. Although the course is in Landscape Architecture and we examined Frederick Law Olmsted’s design, I thought it was important to mention a bit of […]

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Adams Morgan Cemetery Investigated

Perhaps as many as 7,000 people are buried in an abandoned Washington, D.C. cemetery now located under a busy park. The nearly forgotten African American cemetery was re-discovered in 2005 when neighbors discovered human remains in Adams Morgan’s Walter Pierce Park, which includes athletic fields, a dog run, and basketball courts. The cemetery was founded […]

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Researching My House’s History

Last summer I decided to research the history of my house in downtown Washington, D.C. The house is located on the 900 block of Q Street Northwest in the historic neighborhood of Shaw. My block is located within the limits of Pierre L’Enfant’s original street plan for the city which ended around present-day U Street. […]

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Lassiter Interviewed

Ann Arbor blogger Homeless Dave recently posted this interview with University of Michigan professor Matt Lassiter. The interview notes he recently made tenure. Here’s a taste: ML: Yeah. So you’re against sprawl, right? And you can think of that in terms of being a good environmentalist, and you’re against big developers coming in and messing […]

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1100 New York Avenue

I’ve wondered about this building for a while now and only recently got a chance to take some photos. It was built in 1940 as a Greyhound bus station and successfully saved from destruction by the Art Deco Society of Washington, according to their website. The historic structure is now part of the modern office […]

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The Historical Idlewild

While OutKast’s new movie Idlewild (IMDB, official site) may be set in a fictional Georgia town in the 1930s, it shares a name with an actual Michigan place. Idlewild, Michigan was founded in 1912 by a group of four white businessmen as an African American resort community for the growing black middle class. The creators […]

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Do You Believe in UFOs?

The UFO phenomena is so embedded in the contemporary American psyche it’s no wonder they would pop up on singer-songwriter Sufjan Stevens‘ album Illinoise. The two minute first track, titled “Concerning The UFO Sighting Near Highland, Illinois,” ponders the meaning of a mysterious three-lighted craft spotted over the state in May 2000: “Or what it […]

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