U.S. Capitol

George Washington laid the Capitol's cornerstone on September 18, 1793, choosing a design submitted anonymously to a public competition by a self-taught physician named William Thornton over entries from professional architects. Construction dragged for seven years, built largely by enslaved laborers hired out from Maryland and Virginia plantations and free Black craftsmen, under a changing cast of supervising architects who argued constantly over Thornton's plan. Congress held its first session in the unfinished building in November 1800, meeting in a single wing while workers still labored on the rest. The building that exists today bears little resemblance to that first modest structure.

The Capitol nearly ended there. British troops burned the building on August 24, 1814, during the War of 1812, gutting the House and Senate chambers and destroying the Library of Congress's original collection, then housed inside it. Architect Charles Bulfinch oversaw the rebuilding and added a low wooden dome in the 1820s, but Congress had already outgrown the structure by the 1850s. Thomas U. Walter designed the soaring cast-iron dome that still crowns the building, a nine-million-pound structure completed in 1863 even as the Civil War raged outside — a deliberate statement, Lincoln insisted, that the Union itself was not finished.

Bronze Freedom, a 19-foot statue, was hoisted atop the new dome in December 1863, cast partly with the help of an enslaved foundry worker named Philip Reid, who figured out how to separate the statue's sections after the original foreman walked off the job. The Capitol has hosted every presidential inauguration since Andrew Jackson's, held funerals for assassinated presidents, and on January 6, 2021, was stormed by a mob seeking to overturn a certified election — the first forced entry into the building since 1814.