It's all in the name...
Suggest to your students that they might be going to Jenkins Hill, and they probably won’t be very interested.
Use the contemporary name, Capitol Hill, and they may (or may not) get it.
Tell them the visit will take in Congress House, and it might ring a bell.
Suggest that they can take a stroll around the White House, and well, if they don’t understand by this point, it might be worth wondering whether they have actually been paying attention to anything you’ve said in the past six months.
The fact is that some names are familiar and some are not – just as some of the facts associated with the name are familiar and some take us by surprise.
What is not widely known by those who haven’t been there is that the White House is still open to the public (the only Presidential residence in the world that is open in this way, in fact). The US authorities may have shut down the Statue of Liberty for three years after September 11, 2001, but you can still go and see where the President lives.
It is also possible to visit the Supreme Court – and worth noting in passing that the common misconception, that the Court was set up as the ultimate arbiter of justice by the US Constitution, is quite wrong.
In fact, the Court took the power itself during the early part of the 19th century, and in effect there was no one around who felt like (or was able to) challenge it.
In the end it was the court itself that decided it had the power to correct interpretations of the constitution made by the individual states, and we might care to remember that it was the organisation that ruled that the segregation of state schools by race was illegal (much to the annoyance of several states).
To my mind it is examples such as this which make the tour of Washington DC so good. It is not just that one sees these historic institutions and gets the chance to go inside the buildings, but it is also that the tour gives a chance for us all to compare the way things are done in the US with the way they are done in the UK.
