Prologue: Pieces of History

It’s the 100th anniversary of the Girl Scouts, and thousands of girls and young women have descended on Washington, DC, for the Girl Scout Rock the Mall event this weekend. It seems like the perfect time confess my own history crush, a woman who was very involved in the Girl Scouts: Lou Henry Hoover. Actually, [...]

The clothes must make the man! Last week’s photo caption contest winner featured Spring Fashion Week and canvas jumpsuits; this week’s winner pokes gentle fun at what our congressmen might look like before they are suited up for work. Duke Blackwood, the Director of the Ronald Reagan Library and Museum, took on his guest judging duties with [...]

Last week on Facebook, I posted up a image that my colleague found for Shark Week. It wasn’t a biological shark, but a mechanical one. The caption provided some basic information: “A Chinese soldier guards a line of American P-40 fighter planes, painted with the shark-face emblem of the ‘Flying Tigers,’ at a flying field somewhere in [...]

Sometimes sharing a good meal is the best way to resolve the differences you may have with another. For the United States and China, this strategy helped normalize relations during the peak of the Cold War. Today, the U.S. and China share a public relationship, but after Mao Tse-tung’s Chinese Communist Party founded the People’s [...]

The New York Times called it “engrossing and eminently fascinating.” The Richmond Times Dispatch said “Discovering the Civil War” “isn’t your typical Civil War retrospective.” And the Neue Zurcher Zeitung called the National Archives’ newest exhibit, “einer grandiosen Ausstellung in Washington.” Wait . . . was that German? Yes, DCTW isn’t just making a splash [...]