The DC Traveler

This week in Washington, DC, the Smithsonian turned 162 years old.
The Smithsonian Institution was based on a gift of James Smithson, a British scientist, who left his entire estate to the United States of America in 1827.  His gift of over 100,000 gold sovereigns, or $500,000, (just under $9.5 million in today’s dollars) required the government to establish the Smithsonian Institution, to “increase and diffusion of knowledge."

An act of Congress in 1846 expanded the growth of collection into the world’s largest museum complex (16 museums) with over 140 million objects and the National Zoo in Washington, DC. …read more

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Political cartoons are almost as old as newspapers. And poking fun of presidents, political leaders and politics is a mainstay of humor today.
Three-time Pulitzer prize winning cartoonist Herbert Block (“Herblock”), cartooned about politics starting with his first cartoon that appeared in the Chicago Daily News, back in 1929.  The topics he covered early in his career included the aggressive pre-WW-II stance of the USSR and the growing concern of the rise of Nazi Germany.
In 1946, immediately after serving in WW-II, he joined the staff of the Washington Post where he worked until his death in 2001, at …read more

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