On April 26, 1954, second graders at Franklin Sherman Elementary in McLean, Virginia kicked off the nationwide trials of Dr. Jonas Salk's polio vaccine. Called the biggest medical experiment in U.S. History, the much-publicized trials were a turning point in the fight against a disease that had terrified families for decades.

In 1950, an orphaned bear cub was rescued from a wildfire in New Mexico and brought to Washington to live at the National Zoo. Named "Smokey" after the popular Forest Service character, the cub became a real life advocate for fire prevention and got so much fan mail that the U.S. Postal Service gave him his own private D.C. zipcode.

After Richard Nixon resigned during the Watergate scandal, Gerald Ford found himself in uncharted territory. When Ford took the oath of office on August 9, 1974, the White House was not yet ready for him. So, for the first 10 days of his Presidency, Ford commuted to the Oval Office and his suburban neighborhood home in Alexandria, Virginia became the unlikely epicenter of American politics.

In 1941, the U.S. was preparing for World War II. Residents of Queen City, a tight-knit Black neighborhood in Arlington, watched in awe as nearly 15,000 workers erected the Pentagon on a plot of federally-owned land next to their community. Some had enlisted, while others worked for the federal government. But then the government came for their shops, their churches and even their homes.

According to legend, the Hope Diamond has a centuries-old curse and brings disaster to everyone who possesses it. But that didn't deter Washington, D.C. socialites Evalyn Walsh McLean and her husband Ned. After they bought the diamond from the Cartier Jewelry Company in 1911, Evalyn proclaimed, "Bad luck objects, for me, are lucky." For the next 36 years, fate would test that theory.

On the morning of August 21, 1939 five young African American men entered the segregated public library in Alexandria, Virginia and asked for library card applications. They were denied and sat down to read in silence. When the police arrived to arrest the protesters, it touched off a legal fight — and demonstrated the power of a new tactic to defeat Jim Crow.

After Benito Mussolini’s execution in 1945, American psychiatrist Dr. Winfred Overholser of St. Elizabeth’s psychiatric hospital had a hunch that some medical condition might have to been to blame for the dictator’s extreme behavior. So he had samples of his brain sent to Washington, D.C., so that he could examine them. And then, one of the samples went missing.

In the 1930s, Jimmy “The Gentleman Gambler” Lafontaine made millions running the largest casino between New York and Florida from the D.C./Maryland line, despite the fact that gambling was completely illegal. But the city loved him, the police were in his pocket and business was booming — until the mob wanted in on the action.

George Cassiday, an unemployed army veteran from Southeast Washington, D.C. known as "The Man in the Green Hat," kept spirits flowing on Capitol Hill for 10 years. Despite the 18th amendment, he filled 25 orders per day for hard-drinking representatives and even had an office in the House Office building. But after he got in trouble with the D.C. police, Cassiday decided to expose his customers.

Did you know that “The Exorcist,” one of the most famous horror movies of all time, was based on a real DC-area exorcism? The 1949 exorcism allegedly took place in PG, Maryland, and inspired “The Exorcist” author and producer William Peter Blatty while he was a student at Georgetown University. But some of the details in this famous case of demonic possession don't add up.

In 1976 D.C. police dressed as caricatures of Italian mafisosos and bought millions in stolen goods from local thieves. They called it "Operation Sting," and soon police across the country were launching "sting operations" of their own. But not everyone was so enamored with the tactic, especially the communities it was being used to target.

When Frank Kameny was fired from his job with Army Map Service in 1957 because he was accused of being homosexual, he could've gone quietly. Instead, he fought back, founding LGTBQ rights organizations and launching a longshot campaign for Congress in 1971.

On March 22, 1969, a group made up mostly of Catholic priests, nuns and seminarians broke into the Washington office of Dow Chemical Company, a company then synonymous with the production of napalm. What the activists did next — and the criminal trial that followed — created a firestorm of controversy, raising questions about the Church, the war effort, and the limits of non-violent protest.

On December 5, 1980, renowned Washington, D.C. cardiologist Dr. Michael Halberstam was shot during a burglary at his home. Bleeding heavily, the doctor jumped in his car and ran over his assailant while driving himself to Sibley Hospital, where he died. The odd chain of events was just the tip of the iceberg in one of the strangest true crime stories in D.C. history.

In the late 1950s, D.C.'s Curtis Brothers Furniture Store partnered with Bassett Furniture, which built the World's Largest Chair – a 19.5 foot tall, 4600 pound Duncan Phyfe -- and installed it outside their showroom in Anacostia. Then, they built a glass apartment atop the chair and convinced 19-year-old Lynn Arnold to live there in plain view, 24-7.

If you lived in Washington, DC on New Years Day of 1802, you may have noticed a giant wheel of cheese arriving at the White House — a gift to President Thomas Jefferson from a Massachusetts church. But this enormous cheese hadn't traveled hundreds of miles for purely celebratory reasons; no, this cheese had a message about religious freedom in the United States.

In the 1940s, civil rights activists discovered that the key to ending segregation in D.C.’s restaurants might be hiding in plain sight at the library. Civil Rights researchers discovered two old D.C. laws which made it a crime for restaurants to refuse service based on race. As Jim Crow tightened its grip, the laws had faded from memory but Mary Church Terrell was determined to bring them back.

In 1913, thousands of women from across the United States gathered in Washington, D.C. to parade for the right to vote. But when belligerent, drunken men crashed the route, the suffrage march became a street fight.

Uncover the shocking story of Dr. Anton Dilger, a D.C. physician who secretly waged germ warfare on American soil during World War I. From his home in Chevy Chase, Dr. Dilger cultivated deadly bacteria and passed vials of germs to German operatives who used them to poison horses and mules bound for battlefields in Europe. It was the first instance of modern biological warfare.

Tongsun Park operated one of the most exclusive Washington social clubs of the 1960s and 70s, rubbing shoulders with generals, members of Congress, even US presidents. All the while, he was on the payroll of a Korean spy agency, giving millions of dollars in gifts to elected officials. Park was charged with multiple felonies, the House opened up a massive investigation and then... nothing.