Description: [caption id="" align="alignright" width="214" caption="Neighborhood Map (Hopkins, 1887), Hand-colored neighborhood map, Office of the Surveyor Map Collection, Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs."][/caption] Looks a lot cooler than it sounds: the Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs will post more than a century’s worth of beautiful maps to Flickr [via Effie
Description: Born in 1829 to free black parents along the border between Maryland and the District of Columbia, Solomon Galleon Brown would become, at age 23, the first black employee of the Smithsonian. Starting out as a laborer in the Exchange Office, he ultimately became the personal assistant of Spencer Baird, the second secretary of the Smithsonian. By the time of his 1904 retirement,