Creative History

  Imagine a world where the day to day calendar--something as simple as what day in the year it actually is--could vary from place to place.  The New Year might begin as late as March 25th, or much earlier, and things like holidays and the start and end of the seasons could fluctuate from year to year based on the phases of the moon or some other quirk of astronomy much like Easter Sunday and Passover week do to this day.   Well, that is exactly the type of world that citizens of Great Britain and her colonies--including our forefathers here in America--lived in until the year 1752.  In that momentous year everything changed.  Our calendar was completely reset, eleven days from the month of September simply vanished into thin air and for a brief moment in time the entire English speaking world nearly descended into chaos--or did it? But not everyone lived that way until as recently as 1752.  In fact, most Catholics (and many other people who weren’...

  The evening of December 22, 1909 was clear but definitely cold enough to snow as temperatures dipped well below freezing once the sun set that afternoon in Worcester, Massachusetts. Worcester at the end of the first decade of the 20th century despite being known as a statewide transportation hub, and the largest city in central Massachusetts, was still predominantly a walking city.  Some automobiles had already begun to clog the newly paved streets of the city and illuminate passersby with their headlights on the night of December 22, 1909 but as workers rushed home from factories and offices and headed out to the shops in Worcester’s busy downtown to buy last minute Christmas gifts for their kids, the majority of them still travelled by foot and the sidewalks that night were packed with pedestrians. At exactly 6:45 just as the holiday shopping crowd was at its peak on that cold winter’s night in Worcester, over a thousand of the city’s inhabitants looked up in the nightti...

  When thinking about the aftermath of the Battle of Gettysburg--the largest battle ever fought in the western hemisphere--most of us can easily conjure up images of row upon row of white headstones laid out in perfect symmetry.   Many of us, if we think about the battle at all, may think of Victorian Era martial monuments made out of granite or marble, or of brass cannon and wooden fences scattered across lush Pennsylvania farmland.  And of course all of us learned as elementary school students, and we are always reminded whenever Gettysburg is mentioned, of President Abraham Lincoln and his famous address which he gave on the site of the battle in November of 1863 only a mere four months after the guns had fallen silent. But there is a more grisly and horrific side to the aftermath of the Battle of Gettysburg, aside from monuments, orderly cemeteries and Abraham Lincoln that few, if any of us, ever think about  today.  However, the horror of the after...