Histories of the National Mall

Each year, over 25,000,000 people visit the National Mall. These visitors experience what seems to be a deliberately planned landscape connecting the museums, monuments, and memorials that celebrate the history of the United States. However, the Mall has a hidden history as a contested public space, and there is little publicly available information on the landscape itself to inform visitors of its evolution through time.

The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, funded by a $304,565 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, created the Histories of the National Mall project to connect Mall visitors with this landscape’s invisible history.