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Art on November 18, 2019
Photographers hauled their equipment to the top of the Capitol's giant new cast-iron dome and captured the city as it transformed from Civil War chaos to Gilded Age glamour. This 1875 image showed a city that still looked something less than glamorous.
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“Sometimes you sit here and think you hear the funniest things a’ going on,” the infamous House Doorkeeper William “Fishbait” Miller once told an interviewer, Miller’s broad smile casting doubt on whether he actually believed what he said. “Wonder, if those sounds I keep a‘hearin’ are chicken ghosts?”
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by
Art on August 20, 2019
This 1868 image shows the view looking west from the Capitol. The vista takes in both the exhausted postwar city and the growing evidence of a proud, international capital.
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How the Hotel Congressional went from a sleek, modern hotel to a dowdy House workspace to a parking lot, and later, the O'Neill House Office Building, is a tale of the changing nature of congressional work.
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The House Cloakrooms are simple, comfortable waystations where Members can wait between votes, escape for a snack, or conduct business with other Members.
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Today, the federal legislative branch spreads over five House office buildings, three Senate office buildings, three Library of Congress buildings, and the Capitol itself. This Edition for Educators highlights the Capitol campus and the District of Columbia.
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A major renovation of the Cannon House Office Building began in late 2014, uncovering some surprises. Artifacts pulled from the trenches and walls of the building during the restoration tell the story of the structure and its workers.
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by
Art on January 10, 2019
New Members-elect crowd into a committee room in the Rayburn House Office Building, plunging into the centuries-old struggle over real estate known as the office lottery.
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by
Art on November 9, 2018
For our second blog post highlighting military veteran-artists in the House Collection of Art and Artifacts, we look back to the 19th century, at the careers of two Civil War soldiers.
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During a Joint Meeting honoring the bicentennial of Congress in 1989, Minority Leader Robert Michel suggested that what Congress needed during the celebration was “not more congressional prose, but the fiery, living truth of great poetry.”
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Board of Education. Doghouse. Cabinet Room. Sanctum sanctorum. Or, as Speaker Sam Rayburn modestly called his tiny hideaway where informal legislating happened, “the little room.”
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You could buy a coffin, a deer skin, or a slice of pie as you strolled the Capitol 150 years ago. “It is a grand, vaulted, arcaded street,” one visitor enthused, “and during the session filled with a jostling, hurrying throng.”
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