Creative History

Indiana’s Dunes National Park sits on the shores of Lake Michigan.  It is really nothing more than a large, desolate, sandy beach composed of over fifteen thousand square acres of constantly shifting sand dunes.  In 1876 well over one hundred years before this landscape became part of the National Park Service--that didn’t happen until 2009 and until then this place was known simply as “Indiana’s Dune Country”--it was the perfect place to hide away from the long arm of the law or even the perfect place to hide a dead body for that matter. In October of 1876 master counterfeiter Benjamin Boyd was jailed in the city of Joliet, Illinois at the state’s penitentiary after having come to the attention of Chicago law enforcement for--what else?--passing off fake bills.  Passing off fake bills, or counterfeiting was big business in the days after the American Civil War, in fact, it’s not a stretch to say that as the United States celebrated its centennial anniversary in 1876 th...

During 1916, at the height of the First World War, it seemed to most observers as if death and dying itself had become the permanent state of humanity. In February of that year French and German armies fought at the fortress city of Verdun in what, to this very day, still remains the largest and most deadly single battle in human history.  On July 1, 1916 more British soldiers were killed at the Battle of the Somme in one single hour than had been killed in all of the battles of the 19th century Napoleonic Wars combined. However, the most deadly killer that emerged from the muddy trenches of Belgium and France killed silently; couldn’t be seen or heard by anyone and spread across the entire world within a matter of a few years and continued to kill, perhaps for decades, after the guns of the Western Front had long since fallen silent. Today, thanks in part to the recent COVID-19 pandemic, even people without any interest in history at all know about the 1918 Spanish Flu pande...

A Watchmaker, a drifter, an injured man or a person with a cognitive disability--it didn’t matter.  No matter what Robert Hubert was--or may have been--in September of 1666 in the days just after the Great Fire of London had left most of England’s largest city a smoldering ruin, Robert Hubert was an immigrant; maybe a Catholic, a foreigner and what everyone at the time called a stranger.  Robert Hubert was a Frenchman who resided in England and for that reason he was considered a threat in September of 1666; a person who instantly became one of interest on account of his immigration status--a person who may have been responsible for the flaming holocaust that had just incinerated England’s seat of royal power--and who for that reason, was taken into custody by the King’s authorities in the days after the Great Fire of London. Robert Hubert arrived in London at the age of twenty six in the spring of 1666 only weeks prior to the outbreak of the Great Fire.  History does t...

From time immemorial the site at Clonmacnoise in central Ireland on the banks of the storied River Shannon has been considered a mystical and spiritual place.  Clonmacnoise, literally translates from ancient Gaelic as, “Meadow of the Sons of Nois” , named in honor of the offspring of a mythical figure in the  Pagan lore of prehistoric Ireland. In the year 544 missionary Saint Ciarian founded a Catholic Monastery at the site of Clonmacnoise.  Today, Saint Ciarian, along with the much more well known Saint Patrick and Saint Columbia is considered to be one of the “Twelve Apostles of Ireland and Scotland”, those church fathers who first brought Christianity to the British Isles. During his lifetime in the sixth century Saint Ciarian was renowned for his love of learning, knowledge of scripture and his vast collection of manuscripts.  Due largely to Saint Ciarian’s reputation as an intellectual and bibliophile, within a few decades of its founding, the Monastery at C...

Still called the Old Stone Mill by many locals to this day, the Newport Tower--a famed landmark in Newport, Rhode Island--sits just off the coast of Narragansett Bay in Touro Park.  It rises to a height of twenty-eight feet and is roughly circular in nature, though contrary to popular belief, it is not a true circle.  Located on a hilltop, it was once clearly visible to passing ships far out in Narragansett Bay, though construction in Newport during the twentieth century has since obscured most views of the Tower from out at sea.  It is built on land that was once owned by the family of the first Governor of Rhode Island and his eponymously named great grandson, the famous Revolutionary War traitor, Benedict Arnold. Traditionally, it has been believed that construction of the Tower occurred sometime during the 1660’s and that it was used as some sort of windmill, examples of which are common in England to this day--hence the name that many locals still use of the Old St...