Read Dan Brown’s Lost Symbol?
Now read the real story of how Washington DC was built.

Washington: The Making of the American Capital or How Slaves, Idealists, and Scoundrels Created the Nation’s Capital

MORE THAN ANY OTHER single place, Washington, D.C., embodies the lofty aspirations of the United States in physical form. But it also stands as a monument to the most disturbing truths in our racial history, for embedded in the story of its creation is the central role that slavery’s protectors and enslaved African Americans played in the formative years of the nation. Slaves driven by white overseers cleared the land for the new federal city, felling trees and uprooting the stumps that clogged the future routes of streets and avenues. More slaves, hundreds of them, rented by the federal government by the month and year, laid foundations, baked bricks, quarried stone, stirred mortar, sawed lumber, and erected the walls of the grand new temples to American liberty. Without them, the federal city could not have been built. For two centuries, their presence, and their sacrifice, was largely left out of the story of the capital’s creation, as if they had never been there. Some of the players in this decade-long drama are well known, among them George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton...

Excerpted from Washington: The Making of the American Capital by Fergus M. Bordewich. Reprinted by arrangement with Amistad Press, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Copyright May, 2008.

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