Editor’s note: This is the twenty-fourth entry in a series on how historians—especially contingent historians and those employed outside of tenure-track academia—do the work of history. If you know of someone we should interview, or would like to be interviewed yourself, send an email with the subject line HOW I DO HISTORY to pitches@contingentmag.org.
Canden S. Arciniega (@candendc on Twitter) is a tour guide. Here’s how she does history.
What’s your current position?
I am part owner and manager of two tourism companies: DC by Foot and Free Tours by Foot. As a jill of all trades, my job responsibilities run the gamut of developing and leading new walking tours to solving IT issues to customer services to search engine optimization (SEO) and marketing.
Tell us about DC by Foot. How did it come into existence and how long have you been running it?
DC by Foot was founded in 2008 by my business partners, Stephen Pickhardt and Rich and Eddie Zielinski. I arrived in 2011 and applied to be a tour guide with the company. It didn’t take long before I started to become involved in the management of the company in Washington, DC. Around this time, Stephen decided to move to NYC for personal reasons and wanted to start a branch there. I was excited to partner with him in opening up that branch and we’ve continued to open up new cities and partner with existing companies internationally.
The premise of DC by Foot and Free Tours by Foot (which encompasses dozens of other cities) is to offer name-your-own-price tours. This allows travelers of every budget to experience a tour with the best guides in the city.
In addition to offering tours in each city, we curate content to help travelers plan their visits. We work with the biggest history and travel nerds in each city to write travel articles about what to do, how to get tickets, where to stay and eat and other need-to-know information.
What’s a typical work day or work week like for you?
No day is typical in this industry or in my life. I have two young kids (ages 3 and 5) and a husband who is a musician and we also own a winery in Virginia. I joke that my life should be a reality TV show.
I try to only work when I am not with the kids, so, school days and post-bedtime. Tourism, however, knows no sleep and we get requests for tours at all hours, often last minute. We once got an email at 9 PM asking for a tour of the National Mall right then!
Generally, I divide my work day into sections focusing on the day-to-day operations of the company, long-term projects that I’m working on for marketing and social media, and then my personal fun projects. These include our podcast, Tour Guide Tell All, writing books about DC history, and developing new audio tours for cities around the world.
I run the company from my cell phone so there are times I am answering phone calls from the playground, responding to an email mid-tour, or thanks to Siri, texting ideas while driving around the city. Why do the best ideas come while I’m driving?
I enjoy the business aspect of running the company but my passion lies in history so researching new tours and new books is the most fun part of my job.
Books by Canden. All photos provided by the profile subject.
You have turned some of your favorite tours into books. What are those books?
My first book was 2013’s Wicked Georgetown: Scoundrels, Sinners and Spies. One of my favorite aspects of history is its darker side – the scandals and scary stories that you don’t learn about in school. I was approached by The History Press about publishing a book; apparently, they had learned tour guides make good authors.
Post-publication, I noticed that the stories I left out because they weren’t related to Georgetown included a lot of women. I proposed a second book about women in Washington DC. It is technically part of the Wicked series but is entitled Wild Women of Washington. We decided that wicked has a negative connotation and these women weren’t wicked. They just wanted to vote and wear pants.
As I began developing a reputation as a historian of Georgetown, Arcadia Publishing contacted me to write an updated version of their Images of America series about Georgetown.
My most recent book and the one I’m most proud of is LeDroit Park: A History and Guide which was released in October 2022. As far as I can tell, it is the first book entirely dedicated to the history of LeDroit Park. This DC neighborhood was originally built as a gated, white-only suburb of the capital. It quickly changed course after the fences came down and the original residents began to move to other “white-only” neighborhoods of the DC area. It became known as the home of the elite Black community of DC. Still to this day, a walk down the streets of LeDroit Park reveals the unique architecture, flora-filled yards, and incredible stories of DC politicians, activists, authors, and educators.
Explain how you teach history through tours. What don’t people know or appreciate about historical tours?
Often when people think of a tour guide, they imagine an actor in period dress who has memorized a script. That isn’t us. First of all, we don’t dress up. So many people have asked me why I don’t have a lantern. Second, we are all historians and do our own research. For every tour I lead, I have spent countless hours in libraries and historical societies reading diaries, newspapers, and listening to oral histories.
My favorite thing to do when researching neighborhood tours is read through all the census records and google basically every person who lived in the houses. It’s very time consuming but so much fun.
While on a tour, we have the ability to segue into key aspects of history in accessible and fun ways. Guests may think they are hearing a ghost story about a Civil War soldier who pulls on young girls’ pony tails, but they are also hearing the true story of Bette Duvall who hid a note in her hair as she warned US troops of a surprise Confederate attack.
Our most popular tour is Lincoln Assassination. It should not be a surprise what happens at the end of the story, but the 2 hours is suspenseful and includes a lot of details about that night that are not common knowledge. We don’t just talk about Lincoln’s assassination, but how presidential security has changed over the years and what “Democrat” and “Republican” meant in the 1860s. The entire 2-hour tour takes place on one night in American history, April 14, 1865, but we’re able to bring in modern politics and clear up some fallacies that are often found on Twitter.
Canden and her dad, Jay Schwantes, at one of the many Civil War battlefields they have visited.
Have you always been interested in history?
Absolutely! I inherited my dad’s love of history and he fostered it from an early age. Trips to Civil War battlefields were the highlight of my childhood, much to the dismay of my sister, who would much prefer a trip to a big city for shopping and a show.
From an early age, we took trips to learn about different battles. I particularly love Vicksburg, Fredericksburg, and Manassas. A few weeks before my wedding in 2014, instead of a traditional bachelorette party, my Dad and I hopped on his Harley Davidson for a tour of Virginia battlefields. We’d been to most of these before but I figured we’d take a lot fewer trips like this once I was married. Which was true, now I take my Texan husband and two little kids on these trips.
I remember a childhood trip once to Washington, DC for a father-daughter trip. My mom and I always went to see Broadway plays for our trips together, but Dad and I did history. I asked him to take me to the then-new Holocaust Memorial Museum in DC. I think I was 9 or 10, probably a little too young to be honest. There were some vivid videos behind a high wall that I wasn’t tall enough to see over. I still have the passport they give you when you enter telling you about a Holocaust victim or survivor.
ASMR, the YouTube phenomenon where people tap and scratch and whisper to bring tingly feelings to the viewer, is becoming more mainstream. But before this had a name, I used to call it a “history high.” As far back as I can remember, listening to the History Channel gave me tingles. I still get it from listening to audible nonfiction history books – the stories of people and events from the past relax and fascinate me.
Was there a moment that made you want to study history/become a historian?
I was reading a book about the Civil War from the “Dear America” series of historical fiction for children in the 1990s. I had already read so many of these series but I felt a real connection to this book. At the back of the book was a lithograph of a young boy soldier. There was something eerily familiar about the photograph.
I wanted to find out everything I could about the boy in this photo but remember that this was the time of dial-up-internet. I’m not even sure Google existed yet. Needless to say, it took me about 10 minutes to realize that I wasn’t going to be able to find anything. But that desire to find out more about a historic figure started there and has never stopped.
But every once in a while now that so much more material is digitized and I have actual historical training, I try to find an answer to who that boy was—but no luck as of yet.
Canden on the UCL campus when she finished her Masters degree (2008).
Tell us about your undergraduate and graduate experiences.
Elon University in North Carolina was the only school I applied to for undergraduate. It is about 30 minutes from my hometown of Durham literally down the same highway (not interstate, two lane background highway) I grew up on and had a good history program. As I was taking various types of history courses, I gravitated towards ancient history.
I realize now that it wasn’t so much a love of that time period but because I felt American history was too recent. Ancient Rome and Greece seemed so much more… historical. At least to a 19 year old.
During my sophomore year, my best friend had to study abroad in London for her program and I thought why not. So I went, too. I fell in love with London and was determined to move back after graduation.
Most of my senior year research in ancient history used the research of a certain professor at University College London (UCL) so I decided that would be a good way to get back to the UK. I attend UCL for a Masters, where I focused mostly on the legal tradition of ancient Rome.
Funnily enough, I use almost none of the facts from my studies in my current life as a historian in Washington DC. Except classical architecture.
Canden and colleagues at the D.C. History Conference on behalf of DC by Foot.
Tell us about your research interests.
I enjoy focusing on regular people. The stories of those who would be amazed that their stories are included in a book or discussed on a tour. Washington DC obviously has quite a few well known historical figures within the political landscape, but this is a city with families who’ve lived here for generations.
Telling the stories of marginalized populations helps me introduce the real DC to tourists. Perhaps it’s related to my own sense of mortality: my biggest fear is being forgotten and I spend a lot of time worrying about my legacy. The Presidents, Supreme Court Justices, millionaire businessmen all have Wikipedia pages to remember them. I like researching the stories of the people who are close to being forgotten in order to prevent that.
The Tour Guide Tells All team: Dan, Becca, Rebecca, and Canden.
Tell us about your podcast, Tour Guide Tells All.
Tour Guide Tells All started as a joke years ago that we should have a podcast. But when COVID had us all at home, out of work with no outlet for our storytelling, we started recording our Zoom conversations.
Initially, it was hosted by myself and three of my colleagues; Dan King, Becca Grawl and Rebecca Fachner—all full time tour guides with DC by Foot. Over the years, my life became too noisy to record and Dan moved away. Becca and Rebecca are the main hosts and I produce and edit the podcast.
I’m proud that our show has a great spread of figures of all races, genders and eras. We recently won Best DC Podcast at the DC State Fair. Officially, we don’t only talk about DC though – oftentimes the episodes are focused on events or persons that you have heard of but don’t know why you recognize the name.
You are active in supporting women’s history. Tell us how you do so.
I think the main way I support women’s history is to not treat it as a unique thing. Women’s history is just a part of history. Our tours are always highlights. A true tour of Georgetown would be 9 hours long and no one would enjoy that but me, so we just cover select stories.
You may think that Georgetown history is only wealthy, white men. That is a lot of it but by no means all of it. We make sure our tour includes the stories of women, as well as the Black history, immigrant history, and Native American history.
However, we are trying to make up for generations of women’s stories being erased. As much as I would like to say there isn’t a need to highlight women’s stories because it is just part of history, this isn’t the mentality everywhere and always. For that reason, we have a number of women’s history-themed tours that solely focus on these stories.
I recently did a tour through LeDroit Park focusing solely on the women of the neighborhood. We see the childhood home of Eugenie Deland, one if not the only female artist to design a WWI Liberty Bond. More well known names like Mary Church Terrell, Anna Julia Cooper, Alice Dunbar Nelson lived here as they fought for civil rights and equality in education and the arts. I particularly love telling the story of Geneva Perry who grew up on T Street, a few blocks from the famous Howard Theatre. She was introduced to the Black artists who performed at the theater but stayed at her home because they were not welcome at the hotels in DC. Years later, she was a saxophonist for the International Sweethearts of Rhythm, a highly successful all-female, integrated big band in the 1940s.
Canden and family in Edinburgh, August 2022.
How has the pandemic affected you? In 2020 and since then?
Like lots of people, my life was turned upside down in a variety of ways. Both my husband and I have jobs that require socializing. Our kids were stuck at home with us at an age that is nearly impossible to entertain themselves. To be honest, I still haven’t recovered from that exhaustion.
Our initial pivot for touring was to focus on locals. DC is very transient and our belief was that there were many residents of neighborhoods who have never learned the history of their streets. We developed a number of neighborhood tours to market to locals. It was a fun distraction during the chaos to develop these new tours.
At some point while at home, I thought it would be a good time to write the LeDroit Park book. Not sure why I thought that was a good idea. My initial library visit was rescheduled 10 times and I did the final edits on the book while my entire family, myself included, had COVID.
As tourism started to return to DC, we have noticed that travelers are hesitant to book too far out. While it’s understandable, it makes planning very difficult. We have learned that flexibility and going with the flow is key in our current travel environment.
Interior of the historic grist mill at the winery.
Are you working on any new writing or planning to debut a new tour?
Always! I mentioned earlier that my family owns a winery in Virginia with a group of close DC friends. We purchased it with a collection of friends. Apart from drinking it, I have very little interest in wine but on the property is a late 19th century grist mill. No one else in the group was interested in the mill, so it became my project.
My dad and I have been restoring it during the off time of the pandemic. It was in surprisingly good condition, though not functional. My current research project revolves around the mill. We’ve passed the first round of being approved for the National Register of Historic Places.
It was built by a former Confederate sergeant in the 1880s and remained in his family until the 1970s. The mill was the center of the community that entire time. I’m honored to be its caretaker now and preserve its history. I hope to turn this research into a book one day.
What do you think is the biggest misconception people have about what historians do and how they work?
I work a lot with younger students who ask how I have memorized all these facts. I think many think that is what historians do.
This always leads to a discussion about how history changes. I encourage my students to first pay attention to who is telling the stories. Intentional or not, even I am curating what I choose to tell and what I leave out. My background, my interests, and my beliefs influence what I share with my tours.
Aside from personal biases, even historical facts can change as we learn more. I often point out how for years the claim was that George Washington’s home Mount Vernon was painted white. Postcards, ornaments, and old photos all depict a white-washed building. Only recently did experts discover that wasn’t the color of the house. It is now updated with a more beige color that Washington would recognize.
If money, time, and distance were not issues, what’s a dream project you’d love to tackle?
I have a dream to write historical fiction about a female soldier during the Civil War I discovered while writing Wild Women of Washington. Her story is fascinating and doesn’t need poetic license for the plot twists. I want to add dialogue though, so fiction it is.
She was a real person and there are contemporary letters and diaries about her. She donned male clothing to work as a canal boatman, allowing her to make more money than professions then open to women. When recruiters for the US Army came by in the early years of the American Civil War, she signed up and turned out to be one of the best shots in her unit. Or at least, she said so. She guarded a prison that held women charged with impersonating men with no one the wiser that she was doing the same thing.
Research or reading my book will tell you her name, but I’m making it hard so no one writes her story before me. I imagine a novel inspired by her life as historically accurate to her exploits as possible, but with a few character developments that may not be true and a surprise ending that we can’t prove is the truth (but also cannot prove it isn’t!).
If you weren’t a historian, what other kind of work do you think you’d be doing?
I managed a gym when I was in graduate school and really enjoyed it. Maybe I just like being in charge. I can say I could never function in an office job. I need something that allows a lot of chatting and not sitting in a chair.
Canden leading a tour of Capitol Hill for college students.