Washington was drawn on empty tobacco fields in 1791, but the history around it is older and stranger than the Mall suggests. Three days of colonial taverns, the room where Lincoln died, and the U Street blocks that built Black America.
Washington's Potomac plantation, held by the family from 1734 and restored to its 1799 appearance: 21 mansion rooms, the tomb, and reconstructed quarters for the 317 enslaved people held here. Open daily 09:00.
Scottish merchant John Carlyle's 1753 stone mansion, where five royal governors met General Braddock in April 1755 to argue over funding the French and Indian War — a tax dispute that fed into the Revolution.
The 1785 tavern and 1792 City Hotel where Washington reviewed troops for the last time in November 1798 and danced at the Birthnight Balls. Guided tours cover the ballroom, taproom and the ice well beneath the yard.
Built in 1765 by cabinetmaker Christopher Layman, this is the oldest unaltered building in Washington, standing 26 years before the federal city existed. Pre-Revolutionary rooms downstairs, terraced garden behind.
The 1863 theatre where John Wilkes Booth shot Lincoln on 14 April 1865, and the boarding house opposite where he died at 07:22 the next morning. The museum holds Booth's derringer, his diary and the escape-route maps.
The Charters of Freedom sit in argon-filled titanium cases: the 1776 Declaration, the 1787 Constitution and the 1789 Bill of Rights, alongside one of only four surviving 1297 originals of Magna Carta.
Free 60-minute tours run from the underground centre through the Crypt, the old Supreme Court chamber and the Rotunda, where Lincoln's 1865 catafalque and Brumidi's fresco sit beneath the cast-iron dome of 1863.
Four open-air granite rooms for four terms, 1933-1945: a Depression breadline in bronze, fireside-chat quotes cut into the stone, and the wheelchair statue added in 2001 after disability-rights campaigners pushed for it.
Adjaye's 2016 bronze-corona building starts 70 feet underground with the 15th-century slave trade and climbs to the present: Nat Turner's Bible, a segregated rail carriage, and Emmett Till's original casket.
The Anacostia hilltop house Douglass bought in 1877 in open defiance of a whites-only covenant. Ranger tours show his 1,200-volume library, his walking sticks and the stone Growlery where he wrote, mostly original furnishings.
The Gothic Revival house at the Soldiers' Home where Lincoln spent a quarter of his presidency and developed the Emancipation Proclamation through summer 1862, riding three miles into town past camps of freed people daily.
The Spirit of Freedom sculpture stands before curved walls listing 209,145 US Colored Troops who fought for the Union. Around it runs Black Broadway, the segregation-era district where Duke Ellington grew up on 13th Street.