Gettysburg is where my nerd-odyssey began at the tender age of 7 … It will always be a special place to me.

Using a string of far-flung military outposts as base camps for adventure, Catlin crisscrossed an untamed landscape, all-the-while painting a tremendous volume of Indian portraits and native scenes. The images were unlike anything the world had ever seen.

I’m now on a mission to convince one of my regular groups that they should schedule a Baltimore day with yours truly as the group leader. Let me entertain and thrill you, damnit!

The American Civil War Museum, a new institution formed out of a merger between the American Civil War Center and the Museum of the Confederacy, sits on the banks of the James River. If, as the museum’s CEO Christy Coleman says, the Civil War “saved and redefined what the American republic would be,” the new museum redefines the war’s legacy as perpetually bound to our always-fraught present.

Now our tour guests can hold in their hands the very types of stone used to construct the National Cathedral, Smithsonian Museums, Supreme Court and much more. It’s so darn cool.

This week, Americans are submitting their federal income tax returns - and throughout the land there is indeed much gnashing of teeth of rending of garments. Care to know how your pocket book got into this fix?

We heard it through the grapevine! District native Marvin Gaye is now immortalized on a USPS commemerative stamp!

Pre-reading, my knowledge of Ulysses S. Grant was largely limited to his Civil War career. Post-reading, I can now drone on about his presidency, death from a baseball-sized throat tumor, and childhood spent riding horses while getting whacked about the head by a circus monkey. Get ready school groups!

This week marks the 108th anniversary of the catastrophe. It’s a sad story filled with searing imagery.

Let’s stay among the Irish today and learn about the history of Swampoodle - a now vanished DC neighborhood that was once home to the city’s working class Irish (until Union Station came in and ruined everything).