On January 24, 1791, President George Washington chose the site for the
young nation's capital: ten miles square, it stretched from the highest
point of navigation on the Potomac River, and encompassed the ports of
Georgetown and Alexandria. From the moment the federal government moved
to the District of Columbia in December 1800, Washington has been
central to American identity and life. Shaped by politics and intrigue,
poverty and largess, contradictions and compromises, Washington has
been, from its beginnings, the stage on which our national dramas have
played out.
In Washington, the historian Tom Lewis paints a sweeping portrait of
the capital city whose internal conflicts and promise have mirrored
those of America writ large. Breathing life into the men and women who
struggled to help the city realize its full potential, he introduces us
to the mercurial French artist who created an ornate plan for the city
en grande members of the nearly forgotten anti-Catholic political
party who halted construction of the Washington monument for a quarter
century; and the cadre of congressmen who maintained segregation and
blocked the city's progress for decades. In the twentieth century
Washington's Mall and streets would witness a Ku Klux Klan march, the
violent end to the encampment of World War I Bonus Army veterans, the
1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, and the painful
rebuilding of the city in the wake of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s
assassination.
It is our national center, Frederick Douglass once said of Washington,
DC; it belongs to us, and whether it is mean or majestic, whether
arrayed in glory or covered in shame, we cannot but share its character
and its destiny. Interweaving the story of the city's physical
transformation with a nuanced account of its political, economic, and
social evolution, Lewis tells the powerful history of Washington, DC the
site of our nation's highest ideals and some of our deepest failures.
