Achieving statehood would obviously take a while, but how long should it take D.C. to get a single statue in Statuary Hall in the U.S. Capitol? Just as long, as it seems. more ›

Here's a pretty fantastic video -- the result of "years of painstaking work and research" by Dan Bailey, director of the Imaging Research Center (IRC) at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County -- which attempts to show what Washington, D.C. looked like 200 years ago. more ›

And now we turn back to the most important issue in these trying times: just when in the hell is the District going to be getting its spots in Statuary Hall? more ›

If you ever took a field trip to Washington as a kid and paid a visit to the U.S. Capitol, you were sure to walk through Statuary Hall, where all 50 states get to place statues of their most prominent residents. Except the District, of course, which got none at all. more ›

Over at Reason's Hit and Run blog, Katherine Mangu-Ward dips in to a book review she found in European Affairs that describes an aspect to Pierre L'Enfant's original idea for the federal city that we'd never heard of before. We all know about how the District's elaborate grid system of numbers, letters and states was intended to create lots of little squares, triangle parks and other such public spaces in between. But did you know that L'Enfant had much more in mind for those squares?

Each of these squares, he told Washington, was to be, in effect, the center of a little village. All these villages should be settled simultaneously to encourage the city to fill in between them. And one such “village” should be allotted to each state to help attract investors from those states. That way each state would have a presence, symbolic as well as financial, in the new federal city, and engage in prideful competition to settle and expand its stake. Such a visionary idea might have gone a long way toward selling the notion of federalism to those still wary of an imposing national capital.