Images of America Sale

The Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC, is a monument to the nation's 16th president, a commemoration of the country's post-Civil War reunification, and a setting for national events and quiet visits.

Demands for a national memorial to Abraham Lincoln began shortly after his 1865 assassination but produced nothing substantial until the early 20th century. Elevation of Lincoln to legendary status and an extended debate over location and design finally led Congress in 1913 to approve a memorial at the west end of the National Mall. Construction took another eight years. Since its dedication in 1922, the Lincoln Memorial has hosted civil rights demonstrations, presidential events, national celebrations, and day and night visits by millions of people who come to reflect upon one of the most consequential leaders in American history.

Kevin S. Schindler is a historian at Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, and has written six books about science and history. Brian Anderson is a Washington, DC, lawyer and Ford's Theatre Society trustee who previously wrote a book about the history of Ford's Theatre. Drawing upon Washington-area museums and research libraries, Schindler and Anderson have assembled a rich collection of historical images to tell the fascinating story of this American landmark.

Take a historical walking tour and see how the Federal City grew from farmland to world capital.

When it was passed in 1789, the Constitution set out the boundaries not only for a new government but for a new capital city as well. At the time, the new District of Columbia covered 5,000 acres and was dominated by marshland on the south, pastureland on the area that is now the Mall, farms near the White House and Capitol Hill, and undeveloped woods throughout. This engaging photographic history has striking images and detailed captions that tell the fascinating stories behind many of the famous and not-so-famous buildings and monuments that cover the D.C. landscape - from Union Station and the Capitol to the White House and the Watergate Hotel and many important sites in between!

Ford's Theatre in downtown Washington, DC, is best known as the notorious scene of Pres. Abraham Lincoln's assassination on April 14, 1865.

It is among the oldest and most visited sites of national tragedy in the United States. First constructed in 1833 as a Baptist church, the property was acquired by John T. Ford and converted into a theater in 1861. Presenting almost 500 performances before the assassination, Ford afterward sold the building to the federal government. A century later, the National Park Service reconstructed the theater, and Ford's Theatre Society began presenting live performances there in 1968. Since then, the two organizations have partnered to offer more than 650,000 annual visitors an array of quality programming about Lincoln's presidency and legacy. Today, patrons can explore the Tenth Street "campus," consisting of the theater, interactive museum galleries, the house where Lincoln died, and the Center for Education and Leadership.

Explore the complex, heroic and sometimes tragic history of firefighting in Washington, D.C., with images and oral histories gathered over the past century.

From the burning of Washington by the British in 1814 to the Sept. 11 attack on the Pentagon in 2001, firefighters in Washington, D.C., have always known they are the defenders of one of the most important cities in the world. Written by a worthy group of authors from The Capitol Fire Museum of Washington, this book covers the creation of the paid fire department during the Civil War, construction of new firehouses for the fledgling city in varying international designs, the heyday of firefighting before World War II, the turbulent times of the 1960s, and the modern department today.

Washington, DC, Jazz focuses, primarily, on the history of straight-ahead jazz, using oral histories, materials from the William P. Gottlieb Collection at the Library of Congress, the Felix E. Grant Jazz Archives at the University of the District of Columbia, and Smithsonian Jazz.

Home to "Black Broadway" and the Howard Theatre in the Greater U Street area, Washington, DC, has long been associated with American jazz. Duke Ellington and Billy Eckstine launched their careers there in the early 20th century. Decades later, Shirley Horn and Buck Hill would follow their leads, and DC's "jazz millennials" include graduates of the Duke Ellington School of the Arts. For years, Bohemian Caverns and One Step Down were among the clubs serving as gathering places for producers and consumers of jazz, even as Rusty Hassan and other programmers used radio to promote the music. This volume also features the work of photographers Nathaniel Rhodes, Michael Wilderman, and Lawrence A. Randall.

Historic Congressional Cemetery dates from the days when Washington, DC, was a burgeoning city on the edge of a malarial swamp.

The stones--sandstone tablets with colonial calligraphy, ornate Victorian statues, 20th-century art nouveau carvings, and contemporary markers in shapes as strange as picnic tables and upended cubes--are a time line of the city. The most distinctive stones are 171 cenotaphs; large cubes designed by Capitol architect Benjamin Henry Latrobe from the same sandstone used in the Capitol. They are found nowhere else. The men and women buried under those stones led lives of beauty, courage, struggle, cunning, leadership, and humor--in short, the stories of American history.

Step inside Washington's own Gothic cathedral

Despite being built entirely during the 20th century (1907-1990), the techniques used to construct the Washington National Cathedral were the same as those used on the centuries-old Gothic churches in Europe. What powered the larger tools and cranes was different, but otherwise, the processes, ordering, and artistic finishing were almost entirely medieval. The last time a building of this magnitude was built using these techniques, cameras did not exist. Images of America: Building Washington National Cathedral divides the 20th century into decades to detail what must be the first published beginning-to-completion photographic record of the construction of a Gothic cathedral.

The images in this collection capture the diverse history of Georgetown.

Georgetown, a thriving neighborhood in the nation's capital, was established in 1751 as an independent city. As the land to its east was being developed into Washington, DC, the once sleepy river town grew and evolved. George Washington's adopted descendants lived down the street from where Kennedy lived before Camelot; Julia Child walked past the home of Robert Todd Lincoln; and a successful community of free black Americans was built around the corner from what had previously been a slave market. Georgetown depicts the history of a community whose roots span far beyond the prestigious university and upper-class neighborhood for which it is known. The images capture mansions and slums, thriving businesses and crumbling facades, an industrial revolution, and the closing of the C&O Canal.

Mount Pleasant--Samuel P. Brown must have thought the name perfect when he chose it for his country estate on a wooded hill overlooking Washington City.

The name Mount Pleasant suited the New Englanders who settled in the village that Brown founded near Fourteenth Street and Park Road just after the Civil War. Around 1900, the once-isolated village began its transformation into a fashionable suburb after the city extended Sixteenth Street through Mount Pleasant's heart, and a new streetcar line linked the area to downtown. Developers constructed elegant apartment buildings and spacious brick row houses on block after block, and successful businessmen built stately residences along Park Road. Change arrived again with the Great Depression and then World War II, as the suburb evolved into an urban, exclusively white, working-class enclave that eventually became mostly African American. In addition, a Latino presence was evident as early as the 1960s. By the 1980s, the neighborhood was known as the heart of D.C.'s Latino and counterculture communities. Today these communities are dispersing, however, in response to a booming real estate market in Washington, D.C.

This volume contains more than 200 images of prominent homes and noteworthy points of national interest on Capitol Hill, including Union Station, the Navy Yard, Eastern Market, and the B&O Railroad Company.

Capitol Hill celebrates one of the largest historic districts in the nation and a neighborhood rich in history that shaped a nation and the world. Beginning as a port area on the high plateau near the deep water of the Anacostia River, Capitol Hill was largely shaped by the early residential development near the Navy Yard. Later home to middle-class workers in the 19th century, Capitol Hill is now one of Washington's most elite neighborhoods. While the name of the current neighborhood is derived from its proximity to the United States Capitol, it is actually not located on a hill. Situated on the highest point of land between the Anacostia and Potomac Rivers, Capitol Hill began as a small cluster of homes located at First and Second Streets along New Jersey Avenue, Southeast around 1800. The neighborhood was also home to hospitals and boarding houses during the Civil War. The area now known as the Capitol Hill Historic District was primarily built up in the 1880s and 1890s for speculative housing on a more modest scale, but now the district is considered elite with more senators and members of Congress residing there than in any other neighborhood.

Southwest Washington, D.C.: A defined neighborhood even without a proper name.

The quadrant of Southwest Washington, D.C. has a clear border southwest of the U.S. Capitol Building, nestled along the oldest waterfront in the city. Its physical delineations have defined it as a community for more than 250 years, beginning in the mid-1700s with emerging farms. By the mid-1800s, a thriving urban, residential, and commercial neighborhood was supported by the waterfront where Washingtonians bought seafood and produce right off the boats. In the 1920s and 1930s, an aging housing stock and an overcrowded city led to an increase of African Americans and Jewish immigrants who became self-sufficient within their own communities. However, political pressures and radical urban planning concepts in the 1950s led to the large-scale razing of most of SW, creating a new community with what was then innovative apartment and cooperative living constructed with such unusual building materials as aluminum. Author and local historian Paul K. Williams provides and in-depth look at it all.

See how Fort Lesley J. McNair withstood the trials, tribulations and test of time and continues to protect our nation's capital today.

From southeast Washington, DC, where the Potomac and Anacostia Rivers meet, Fort Lesley J. McNair still protects America's capital. In 1791, Pierre L'Enfant designated it as a military reservation. The post is the third oldest in continuous operation--as an arsenal, a penitentiary, a hospital, and now, a military education center. It was renamed in 1948 to honor Lt. Gen. Lesley J. McNair, who was killed in World War II. Over the course of two centuries, the fort has borne witness to the British ransacking during the War of 1812; a Civil War explosion that killed female arsenal workers; and the incarceration, trial, and hanging of Lincoln assassination conspirators.

Over time, it became the home of several artillery commands, the first federal penitentiary, the US Army Engineer School, the US Army Music School, the US Army War College and the US Army Band (""Pershing's Own""). Today, it has evolved into the National Defense University, Inter-American Defense College and the headquarters of the Military District of Washington.

Filipinos arrived in the Washington, D.C., area shortly after 1900 upon the annexation of the Philippines to the United States. These new settlers included students, soldiers, seamen, and laborers.

Within four decades, they became permanent residents, military servicemen, government workers, and community leaders. Although numerous Filipinos now live in the area, little is known about the founders of the Filipino communities. Images of America: Filipinos in Washington, D.C. captures an ethnic history and documents historical events and political transitions that occurred here.

On the edge of the 1792 original city plan by designer Pierre L'Enfant lies the Greater U Street neighborhood.

For nearly 70 years before the Civil War, orchards and grazing land covered the area. When Camp Campbell was settled during the war where Sixth and U Streets now lie, thousands of fighting soldiers and then freed men and women flocked to the area. The fighting ceased, and many people remained to construct small wood frame homes, churches, and businesses that eventually gave way to the elegant rows of substantial brick townhomes lining the surrounding street today. The rise of racial segregation in the early 1900s cultivated the Greater U Street area into a ""city within a city"" for the African-American community, and it remained so until the urban riots of 1968. The 1920s and 1930s witnessed a thriving cultural scene, with entertainers such as Sarah Vaughn, Pearl Bailey, Cab Calloway, and the neighborhood's own Edward ""Duke"" Ellington frequenting private clubs like Bohemian Caverns and other venues such as the Howard, Dunbar, Republic, and Lincoln Theaters. Known by many as the ""Black Broadway,"" Greater U Street was unique in that many of its institutions-Industrial Bank and True Reformers Hall among them-were designed, financed, owned, and built utilizing the talents of such emerging African-American professionals as banker John Whitelaw and architect John A. Lankford.

View the legacy of the long-standing African-American neighborhood that formed the close-knit community today.

Located in the far northeastern edge of the city, Deanwood is one of Washington, D.C.'s oldest, consistently African American neighborhoods. Rooted in slave-based agriculture on white-owned land, the community began its transition from rural to urban development with the 1871 arrival of a branch of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad along its western boundary. This period after the Civil War offered blacks the opportunity to become landowners. Since this time, many notable Washingtonians of various ethnicities have been residents and frequent visitors to the area. In the early 1920s, it was home to Suburban Gardens, the only permanent amusement park ever to be housed within the city limits. Many of Deanwood's families have lived in the community for generations, which makes it stable and close-knit.