The oldest platform carousel built in the United States continues to delight children in Martha’s Vineyard.

The massive machine creates cracking displays of indoor lightning.

Since 1947, this living history museum has been providing an immersive look at life in Plymouth Colony.

Colorful clay cliffs tower over an unofficial nudist beach on Martha's Vineyard.

Louisa May Alcott based “Little Women” on her experiences growing up in this house with her sisters.

A former waterfront market is now in the center of town due to some interesting Boston engineering.

This candy-colored storybook village originated as a 19th-century Methodist campground.

The 5.5-mile ring of steel posts around the Capitol Building is one of the largest (and most uniform) of its kind in the world.

This mysterious structure by the Washington Monument is a flood barrier designed to protect the White House against rising waters.

A derelict bit of infrastructure from the canal that once ran through D.C. is landlocked in the heart of the city.

A muscular Art Deco monument represents the struggle between regulators and unbridled markets.

Daredevil repair workers can worm their way out the access hatch, loop ropes over the apex and rappel down the monument.

The little-known, 300-year history of the area includes former lives as a bustling tobacco port, parking lot, and industrial dump.

The "lovely red Vega" of the legendary record-settling pilot.

A little marble compass above George Washington's (empty) tomb in the Capitol marks where D.C.'s four quadrants intersect.

Washington's iconic carousel has a nice piece of Civil Rights history.

Decades before the scandal, this staircase on the river was a literal "water gate."

Rumor has it the uncarved lump behind the three famous suffragists is reserved for the first woman president.

Perhaps the most scandalous statue of America's first president.

Railroad officials in the early 1900s sought to spare travelers the sight of Roman soldiers’ private parts.

One critic described it as "middle Mussolini, early Ramses, and late Neiman-Marcus." Another called it an architectural "natural disaster."

A line of blue paint marks the route of the inaugural parade.

Corn-inthian columns with a uniquely American take on neoclassical architecture.

This statue of one of baseball’s greatest pitchers looks like something out of a sci-fi horror movie.