Courtesy of our friends over at Fishbowl DC, today we discovered that Time had quietly launched a new blog on national politics. Called Swampland and featuring the online musings of Ana Marie Cox, Joe Klein, Karen Tumulty, and Jay Carney, there really isn’t anything about this blog that sets it apart from the many other notable blogs on national politics, either independent or MSM-run. Except the name. Oh, the name.

We thought the myth had been settled. You know — the myth. The one that says that Washington was originally built on a swamp. It’s a myth that offers anyone with a mild criticism of Washington and its functions any number of clever zingers — “Reform moves slowly in the swampy muck that was and is Washington,” might go one. The problem is that it’s simply not true. As far back as 2001 historians had all but put this one to rest, with one writing on a popular history listserv:

For the past ten years a number of historians of Washington, DC, have been trying to put to rest the idea that the city was built on a swamp. The Mall in particular was not a swamp, though it did have a river with a tidal flow next to it (where today’s Constitution Avenue runs). As I read the web site in question, it does not suggest that the area was originally a swamp.

The City of Washington, like every other US city founded in the 17th and 18th centuries along tidewater, did have low ground. But the knee jerk association of Washington with a swamp, on a list on urban history, does a disservice, unless we all want to join forces and begin talking about the New York swamp, and the Philadelphia swamp, and the Baltimore swamp, etc. It bears remembering that to many Europeans in the 18th century all of America was a swamp.

If Time wants to be accurate, they should stick to what Washington could better be described as — a tidal marsh. Then again, that doesn’t make for any clever blog names, does it?