Monuments in Washington DC
8 monuments to discover with Bad Historian in Washington DC.
The DC War Memorial
You're looking at a small, round, marble temple with twelve columns and a dome. It's forty-seven feet tall. It looks like a bandstand. That's because it IS a bandstand.
The Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial
Seven and a half acres. Four outdoor rooms. Waterfalls that get louder as you walk deeper. A bronze breadline. A bronze dog. And all of it built for a man who specifically said — do not build me a monument.
The Jefferson Memorial
The Jefferson Memorial. A hundred and twenty-nine feet of white marble modeled on the Roman Pantheon. Twenty-six Ionic columns.
The Korean War Veterans Memorial
Nineteen soldiers in stainless steel, walking through juniper bushes toward a pool of still water. Each one about seven and a half feet tall. Nearly a thousand pounds apiece. Fear on their faces. Ponchos billowing.
The Lincoln Memorial
The Lincoln Memorial. You know this building. Everyone knows this building. What almost nobody knows is this: While Lincoln was alive, America HATED him. The South, obviously. But the North hated him too.
The Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial
The address of this memorial is nineteen sixty-four Independence Avenue. They chose that number for the Civil Rights Act of nineteen sixty-four. Look at the layout. Two massive boulders form the entrance — the Mountain of Despair.
The Vietnam Veterans Memorial
The Wall. Two hundred and forty-six feet of polished black granite on each side, meeting at a vertex ten feet and three inches above your head. Fifty-eight thousand names. And the whole thing started with a movie ticket.
The World War Two Memorial
The World War Two Memorial. Fifty-six granite pillars. Two triumphal arches. A wall of gold stars. The whole thing cost a hundred and ninety-seven million dollars — almost all of it raised with private donations.
Washington DC Audio Experiences
Visit these monuments and more on a self-guided audio experience.
Dead Letters and Cursed Gems
Seven museums on the National Mall, each hiding something absurd. A flag stitched on a brewery floor by a widow and a thirteen-year-old. A cursed diamond mailed for two dollars and forty-four cents. A Leonardo da Vinci smuggled in a suitcase under an FBI codename. A college student who got a C and amended the Constitution. And the most important airplane in history, exiled to London over a grudge.
Georgetown Was Here First
The oldest neighborhood in Washington didn't ask permission. Walk from George Washington's bankrupt canal and the Exorcist steps to a university built by a man who passed as white, the Georgetown mansion where the United Nations was invented, and the bar where JFK proposed — through the part of the city that existed before the city did.
Monuments to the Dead
How America learned to remember — by fighting about it every single time. Seven memorials around the Tidal Basin, from the World War Two gold stars to the sinking Jefferson: the lawsuits, the insults, the twenty-one-year-old who got a B-plus, and the long argument a country has with its own memory.
Spies, Lies & Dead Drops
How Washington became the most paranoid city on Earth — and earned it. Walk from Ford's Theatre to the Soviet Embassy through the ugliest building in America, a hotel that smuggled a president, the most bugged address on Earth, an apartment complex where five men got caught with consecutive serial numbers on their bills, a spy's mailbox in Georgetown, and a tunnel that cost hundreds of millions and produced nothing.
The Night Lincoln Died
A comedy, a conspiracy, and the longest night in American history. Walk the assassination hour by hour — from the Capitol where Lincoln took the oath, to the boarding house where the plot was hatched, Ford's Theatre, the tiny room where he died, and the memorial to a man America hated while he lived and sainted the moment he died.
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