Washington Seen: A Photographic History,1875-1965

A steam engine chugs along the Mall. The Knights Templar parade down an unpaved F Street. Workmen finish an arch at the new Library of Congress building. And the paddleboats are lining up for a concert at the Watergate Barge.

In Washington Seen Fredric Miller and Howard Gillette bring together nearly four hundred unique photographs from the Gilded Age to the Great Society. Throughout, the focus is not on streets and monuments but on the complex relationships among the people of Washington -- men and women, black and white -- and the way they worked and lived.

At the second district police station, black faces among the white reveal that in 1878 racial integration had come -- temporarily -- to the nation's capital. (Sixty-five years later, marchers would demand the hiring of black bus drivers to help win the "fight against fascism.") At the Treasury Department in 1910, men in white shirts work as engravers while women count the newly printed currency; in an adjacent photo, a lone black man bends over a washtub in the "Cuspidor Washing and Sterilizing Room" of the Capitol.

Everywhere in these photographs is a richness of detail that captures a bygone moment with startling precision. Ancient tools and pipes surround a workman in the "plumbing room" somewhere in the depths of the Capitol. A pair of young girls stand, smiling, in a Depression-era back alley, every brick and paving stone sharp and clear. Assembly line workers in an eerily lighted loft peer out from behind a row of artificial limbs. A boy leans down for a better look at the well-stocked candy counter of a black-owned grocery store.

Here are Washingtonians at home and at work, at restaurant tables and lunch counters, in schools and churches, dancing the jitterbug and going to the movies, cheering the Redskins, the Senators, and the Homestead Greys. In the accompanying text, Miller and Gillette invite readers to enter into an intimate "conversation with the past," offering insightful commentary on the images of people whose faces cannot fail to captivate.

Praise for Fredric Miller's Still Philadelphia and Philadelphia Stories:

"Upon its publication, this beguiling and compelling book becomes a classic... There are no famous names, no portraits of the powerful -- unless by power you mean the kind of strength recorded here in the faces of ordinary men and women. These are pictures of lives and scenes stopped in time... The publication of such a book is a cause for rejoicing." -- Philadelphia Inquirer

"[A] textured and intriguing book... The photographs convey a sense of the persistent vigor of community life." -- Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography

Fredric M. Miller is former director of Temple University's Urban Archives Center and co-author of Still Philadelphia and Philadelphia Stories. Since 1989 he has been a program officer with the National Endowment for the Humanities. Howard Gillette Jr. is professor of American Civilization and History at George Washington University, where he was founder and first director of the Center for Washington Area Studies. He has been editor of Washington History, the journal of the Historical Society of Washington, D.C., and a frequent contributor to books and journals on American urban and political history.