Tag Archives: washington times

Primary Sources of DC

 http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn84026749/1914-02-09/ed-1/seq-1/

This is the newspaper “The Washington Times”. The date was for February 9, 1914. The newspaper shows things like weather, sales, jobs wanted, and government issues. The headlines of this newspaper are mainly presidential actions. The times in DC seem to show there wasn’t a lot going on other than government affairs. After reading these story lines, small crimes were more important and the money was a lot less, in the sense that today a lot of problems are dealt with hundreds of millions of dollars and here it was only $2.3 million. I found this source fairly difficult to work with because of the language used. It was hard to understand the government talk of the early 1900’s. A lot of this newspaper was about government issues so it would be boring and unappealing to a person like me who doesn’t like to read about politics. This paper corroborates well with other newspapers of this time because they all talk about government and local problems that don’t seem like very bad problems in the modern day. Things like someone not wearing the proper clothes to church would be broadcasted in the newspaper back then, however now it’s all about murders, bank robberies and other large crimes.

 http://www.loc.gov/resource/g3850.ct001206/

This primary source is a map of Washington D.C. in 1857. The city clearly wasn’t very defined and detailed at that point. however there are still the same roads and some same landmarks. The Captiol is also labeled in this map. Everything on this map seems to feed into the Capitol. The map also contains all of the house and building numbers. For the 1800’s, this was a pretty good map to read and go off of for directions and such. I think this map would be very good for someone who had no clue how to get around the area. It has house numbers, building names, and street names. The map also has an interesting section of notes that tell the population by the decade, explains how many certain pieces of infrastructure there are, and the size of the city. The notes section even explains how the roads are named and setup.

Current map of Washington, D.C.