Washington DC

The Algonquian-speaking Piscataway lived along the Potomac when Europeans arrived in the early 17th century, and the Nacotchtank had settlements beside the Anacostia River. After independence, the Residence Act of July 1790 created a federal capital on the Potomac, a compromise in which the southern states gained the capital in return for federal payment of state war debts. In 1791 George Washington commissioned the French-born engineer Pierre Charles L'Enfant to design it, with broad avenues radiating across a grid. Maryland and Virginia were slave states, and enslaved labour helped build the White House and the Capitol. Congress first met in the unfinished Capitol in November 1800.

On 24 August 1814, during the War of 1812, British troops occupied the city and burned the Capitol, the White House and other federal buildings before a storm drove them out. In 1846 Congress returned the land south of the Potomac, including Alexandria, to Virginia. In 1862, nine months before the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln signed the act that ended slavery in the district, freeing about 3,100 people, and the Civil War brought rapid growth and a large influx of freed people. In 1871 Washington and Georgetown were merged into a single government, and the McMillan Plan of the City Beautiful movement later reshaped the Mall.

The population peaked at about 802,000 in 1950. After Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination in April 1968, riots burned the U Street, 14th Street, 7th Street and H Street corridors, and rebuilding took until the late 1990s. The Home Rule Act of 1973 gave the city an elected mayor and council, and in 1975 Walter Washington became its first elected mayor. Congress keeps the power to overturn local laws, and a statehood bill passed the House of Representatives in 2021 but not the Senate.

Washington lives two lives: the federal city of monuments, museums, embassies and lobbyists, and the home town of hundreds of thousands of residents. The free Smithsonian museums, the National Gallery and the memorials of the Mall draw visitors from across the country, while 177 embassies and international institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund give the city a global population of diplomats and officials.

The city has a long and influential Black history. U Street, 14th Street and Shaw were the centre of a Black Renaissance in the Jazz Age, part of the wider Harlem Renaissance, with the Howard and Lincoln theatres among the country's leading stages; Duke Ellington was born in Washington. In the late 1970s the bandleader Chuck Brown popularised go-go, a percussion-driven style of funk and rhythm and blues that is the city's own music. Today the 9:30 Club and other venues around U Street keep the music scene busy.

Political life shapes the calendar and the conversation, and the district's lack of voting representation in Congress is a long-standing local cause: in a 2016 referendum 85 per cent of voters supported statehood. Immigration from El Salvador, Ethiopia, Mexico, Guatemala and China has added new communities, among them a concentration of Salvadorans in Mount Pleasant.

The 2020 census counted 689,545 residents, and weekday commuters from the Maryland and Virginia suburbs push the daytime population above one million. The wider metropolitan area, reaching into Maryland, Virginia and West Virginia, had about 6.3 million people in 2023, the seventh-largest in the country.

The federal government employed about a quarter of the people working in the city in 2022, and much of the rest of the economy serves it: law firms, contractors, lobbyists, think tanks and non-profits clustered around K Street. Universities and hospitals, among them Georgetown and George Washington universities, are major employers, and tourism is the second-largest industry, with about 22 million visitors in 2022.

The city is divided into four quadrants and 131 neighbourhoods, from the rowhouses of Capitol Hill to the new towers of Navy Yard and the Wharf. Residents rely on the Metro and the roads to the suburbs, and long commutes and the cost of housing are recurring issues across the region.

The half-smoke is the city's own sausage: half beef and half pork, served in a hot-dog bun with onions, chili and cheese. Its most famous home is Ben's Chili Bowl on U Street, founded in 1958 and a fixture of Black Washington. The city is also the birthplace of mumbo sauce, a condiment like a sweeter barbecue sauce, often used on meat and chips.

Ethiopian food is a particular strength: Washington is known as one of the best cities in the world for it, thanks to the Ethiopian immigrants who arrived in the 20th century. Dishes are served on injera, a spongy, slightly sour flatbread used to scoop up stews. Salvadoran pupusas, thick stuffed corn tortillas, reflect another large community, and restaurants across the city cover Middle Eastern, African, Asian, European and Latin American cooking.

Markets and food halls are good places to eat well. Eastern Market on Capitol Hill has been a public market since the 19th century, Union Market in Northeast has become a large food hall, and the historic Maine Avenue Fish Market on the Wharf keeps the waterfront's old trade alive. Across the region, Old Bay, a seasoning used chiefly on crab and shrimp, is especially popular in Maryland.