This resource guide aims to bring local history alive. Students can use tools of history to explore their school's neighborhood and where they live; as they learn more about areas they know and those they haven't yet explored, the city itself becomes a classroom.
Provided are background resources, aimed for adult learners, as well as lesson plans and activities aligned to District of Columbia Social Studies Standards. In addition to resources that address the city as a whole, there are neighborhood-specific guides that help prepare educators to teach the varied and often complicated histories of DC's communities. Each neighborhood's page is organized by thematic questions, the answers to which are found in primary and secondary resources from the DC History Center, DC Public Library, the Library of Congress, and other institutions.
This guide will be updated and additional neighborhoods periodically added. The DC History Center especially thanks Domonique Spear, Claire Bents, Philip Warfield, Cody Norton, Mariana Barros-Titus and Tamia McDonald for their contributions. This guide and accompanying curriculum was developed with support from the Clarice Smith Neighborhood History Program at the DC History Center.
The Clarice Smith Neighborhood History Program aims to support DC’s K-12 educators as they immerse their students in the history of the city around them. The project is named in honor of artist and philanthropist Clarice Smith (1933-2021), who lived her first 11 years in Old Southwest, her teen years in Petworth, and eventually moved to Bethesda, Maryland.
Born Clarice Rae Chasen, she experienced a sheltered, lower middle-class life as the daughter of a Jewish immigrant corner grocery owner. Clarice’s world revolved around her home at 331 H Street, Amidon School, and the Southwest Branch Library housed in Jefferson Jr. High School. Once the family moved “uptown” to a Petworth rowhouse in 1944, she attended MacFarland Junior High School and Roosevelt High School, from which she graduated in 1951.
Clarice Smith went on to become a professional artist, and also a philanthropist in collaboration with her husband Robert H. Smith. She attended the University of Maryland and received a BA and MFA from the George Washington University, where she was also a member of the Art Department faculty from 1980-1987. In 2012, she was awarded an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts by the George Washington University to mark her distinguished career in the arts. In 2015, Clarice was awarded a Doctorate of Humane Letters from the University of Maryland.
In the Fall 2022 issue of the DC History Center’s Washington History magazine, Clarice Smith shared her family photo collections as she told the story of her early years, through oral history interviews conducted by historian Jane Levey. The full story, “Counting Change: The Old Southwest of Clarice Smith,” can be accessed online via the JSTOR database. This article is one of many that helps to bring neighborhood history alive through the lived experiences of local Washingtonians.
