As the seat of the United States’ capitol, Washington, D.C. has a mighty gravitational pull for visitors nationally and internationally. People are motivated to visit for various reasons, including arts, culture, architecture, and political expression. Pulling from archives of documentary and anecdotal sources, Dr. M.J. Rymsza-Pawlowska will explore who visits D.C. and why, and how personal experience, popular culture, and politics have defined the expectations and experiences of visitors to Washington, DC from the beginning of the 19th century to today.

Dr. M.J. Rymsza-Pawlowska is associate professor of history at American University. She is the author of History Comes Alive: Public History and Popular Culture in the 1970s, numerous academic articles, and pieces in the Washington Post and the Inclusive Historian’s Handbook. Rymsza-Pawlowska is 2023 Scholar-in-Residence at the Heurich House Museum and serves on the editorial board of Washington History, as well as advisory boards for the DC History Center, the Humanities Truck, and the University of Wroclaw’s Public History Summer School. Dr. Rymsza-Pawlowska holds degrees from Brown and Georgetown Universities.

History Happy Hour series is made possible in part by a generous contribution from Rob and Cheryl Crim.