The Mount Vernon Trail follows the Potomac River, linking iconic bastions of Americana from Georgetown to Mount Vernon.

There’s a lot of history evident along the way, but what of history that has disappeared — or been erased?

How does choosing to be curious about the people and places around us help us discover, elevate and amplify history that’s perhaps less well-known?

In this third episode of the “Mile in Their Shoes” series, we use the Trail as a vehicle for tracing our shared history, with the help of a local museum, a local government, and an independent journalist.

Listen to Choose to Be Curious #262: A Mile in Their Shoes: Shared History

Check out the Black Heritage Museum of Arlington. Many thanks to Craig Custis Syphax for his generosity here and more broadly in keeping this history alive.

Check out the City of Alexandria’s African American History Division, and the terrific African American Heritage Trails which illuminate history along stretches of the Mount Vernon Trail through Old Town Alexandria. Many thanks to Audrey Davis, Director, for her long-standing leadership in this area.

And thanks to Kim O’Connell who writes, as she puts it, at the intersection of people and place. Check out her writing on history and culture, Echoes of Little Saigon: Vietnamese Immigration and the Changing Face of Arlington, and the associated walking tour.

This is the third in a periodic series of shows in which we “walk a mile” in someone else’s shoes, seeing the world through others’ eyes. Inspired by the Mount Vernon Trail, a bike and pedestrian path that follows the Potomac river and enjoys amazing views of Washington, D.C., we try to see the world…differently.

In the first of the series, we experience the Trail through the eyes of people who volunteer their time to take care of it: A Mile in Their Shoes: Friends of the Mount Vernon Trail (an audience favorite!).

In the second, we honor the fact that the Trail is here because the Potomac River is there, an always-scenic but often-silent companion. With the help of a river keeper, a meteorologist and the owner of a local sailing school, we begin to see and hear and smell the river differently: A Mile in Their Shoes: A River Runs through Us.

Photo: “On the Point – ‘Buddies,’ May 30, 1897” Alexandria Black History Museum, used with permission.

Theme music by Sean Balick; music by Onesuch Village, via Blue Dot Sessions.

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