Washington DC

Ahh, there’s nothing better than being home after a long trip. Traveling is always fun for me. I love airports and plane rides and the feeling of anticipation leading up to the actual trip. Conferences aren’t always in interesting cities, but Washington D.C. works great for someone like me because I love history and am endlessly entertained by museums.

I read Devil in the White City on the plane. Highly recommended if you love historical fiction! Not as good as The Historian, but still a great read.

To be frank, the conference wasn’t that great. That isn’t to say that it was a bad conference, it just wasn’t one geared to my interests, and as a result, the few sessions I went to had high expectations. Expectations they did not really live up to, I guess. It is tough to find a session with good topics, good approaches to those topics, and good presentation style to engage the audience. These three things are miraculous when they happen. I didn’t quite get that feeling this time around. That being said, some of the sessions I missed out on may have been really cool. I’m bummed that I missed out on a cool session on video games, and another one on The Wire. But the conference was only part of the reason for my trip. I got to meet up with some great longtime friends.


It was actually a reunion of sorts, as us grad students had once come together to Washington D.C. For this very conference in 2001, just two months after 9/11.

We felt it was important to go then, and I do remember the gash down the side of the pentagon, as well as the heightened security in the airports. I wanted to go this time and get a good look at the White House now that Obama is president. Of our group of 6 from 2001, only 3 of us were reunited. We reminisced about that old trip, but we also talked about how different things are, now that we are all either writing dissertations or post-doctoral and job seeking. The ASA Presidential Address by Kevin Gaines was excellent, but it was a little sad for me, as he reminded the crowd that the economic crisis has failed colleges and universities (and, as a result, working class students) across the nation, none more than those in California. These are troubling times.

Highlights from the trip:

Right when I got into town, I called up my pal Jeremy, who met up with me at the conference hotel. We had some appetizers for dinner and then I asked him to take me to a real bar. “A real bar?” “Yes, a real bar. Not a hotel bar, not a grill-pub, a dingy dirty bar.” One hour in DC and I was already over being surrounded by people in bad suits. We went to the Black Cat, which I loved immediately. Nothing feels better than a non-pretentious bar.
Randomly, the bottom floor of the bar is called "The Red Room" and is pretty much exactly like my local bar of the same name. Weird!

The next day, as I walked around near my hotel, I noticed that DC isn’t really big on diners. It was tough to find a decent place for breakfast. I looked up some options on Yelp! and found Lincoln’s Waffle House, which was great! Initially I thought I had missed out, because when I finally walked all the way to the address, this is what I saw:




But a sign mentioned that they moved a few doors down, so I managed to have my waffles after all.

Directly across the street from Ford’s Theater, Lincoln’s Waffle House is a non-touristy place to get great food cheaply and quickly. I was in and out in less than half an hour.


It’s right next door to the house Lincoln died in, which is morbid but also interesting to someone like me, who is fascinated by morbid details.

I went to a lot of museums. I mean a LOT of museums. The most interesting by far was the International Spy Museum, which was a very interesting look at spies and secret agents throughout the nation’s history. I was impressed by the way the museum both respected the job of the spy but also pointed out that becoming a spy is giving up your own personality and risking your life--something that only a particular kind of (bizarre) person would be willing to do. It was filled with lots of technological spy stuff, but also with stories of double agents and the increase in spy behavior during the Cold War. Basically, if you live in a building built during the Cold War in Russia, you probably have a bug in your house. It was so interesting that I didn't even take pictures, I just experienced the museum.



Another museum that was quite moving was the Holocaust Memorial Museum. I was lucky enough to go with a friend who studies holocaust museums, so I got a really good perspective on how the museum tells its story.

A while back, a white supremacist shot at the building and killed one of the guards. They still have a lot of security out front, one guard even had a bomb sniffing dog.I have studied the Holocaust since I was about 12 years old. Much of the more disturbing images and information I already knew. It doesn't make it less moving, but it did make me prepared for most of what I saw. The most moving part of the whole experience was a hallway that is two stories high, covered with old photographs.

As you walk through, you see all kinds of photos. Family photos, like one big giant album of everyone that existed in a town. People having fun. Women with their babies. Whole families. Wedding pictures. All of these photos come from a city in Bulgaria named Monastir. All of its inhabitants were Jews that were rounded up and sent to their deaths in Treblinka. A whole town full of people, gone forever. Looking in their faces was..well, I can't really explain the feeling. It's supposed to be moving, and you walk through it twice. Once through the top half on a suspended bridge, and after the section on the Final Solution, you find out that all of these people are dead and enter the bottom half. Even looking at the photo of the room now is tough.

Of course, I made a point to view the original Constitution and Declaration of Independence at the National Archives. I didn’t do it the last time around, and I’m a sucker for parchment. As are about a thousand other people who herded along, making it difficult to get a good view.

I noticed that the National Archives had a research section, so I went in and looked up some genealogical information about M’s family. I managed to find most of his grandparents’ census records, which gave me some good information about when his ancestors immigrated to the U.S. (so far, all of them came at the turn of the century). I hope to do more research once I move to the east coast.

Of course, as a fan of Bones, I had to go to the Jeffersonian, I mean, Smithsonian and look at some bones. There were very interesting displays about people they’ve dug up in the Chesapeake region from the earliest European colonists. The most heartbreaking was this one:


Unlike the children of the family, who got proper burials with grave markers, this grave is likely of a servant boy who died c.1663 and was buried in a shallow grave in the cellar along with some trash.

I did the Smithsonian Natural History museum, which wasn’t that interesting to me, but holy taxidermy Batman!

They were creative with the taxidermy as well, making the animals come to life (or meet their death) for eternity.


All in all, a successful trip in terms of the fun I had, not so successful career-wise, but it was nice to know I’m not alone in feeling the way I feel about teaching, job prospects, and other professor-related stuff. There is something absolutely beautiful about the east coast in the fall. Such beautiful colors and a comfortable coolness. I was happily walking around at night with my scarf and thick tights. Yay fall!