Creative History

     Just after midnight on July 30, 1916 Jersey City firefighters responded to reports of a series of small fires burning along the piers on Black Tom Island in New York Harbor. Black Tom is an artificially created island that is located on the New Jersey side of the harbor adjacent to Ellis and Liberty Islands.   Originally, Black Tom had simply been the name given by sailors to a large rock that had stood out above the waterline in New York Harbor.  This rock had become infamous because of the hazards it posed to ships trying to enter and exit Manhattan. For that reason, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, the space surrounding Black Tom had begun to be used for dumping refuse and garbage from New York City.  Within the space of only a few years an artificial island was created by all of this landfill and prior to the turn of the twentieth century a railroad was constructed that connected Black Tom Island to mainland New Jersey.  F...

          In 1561 Nuremberg Germany is what we today would call a free city.  It is a Bavarian principality, located in the south of modern day Germany, largely under its own government. For the time, the citizens of Nuremberg are mostly well-educated, cosmopolitan and fairly well off.  The Protestant verse Catholic calamity of the Thirty Years War, which will permanently scar the cities and landscape of central Europe, remains nearly six decades in the future, and the infamous Nazi Party rallies which will come to forever mark Nuremberg as synonymous with the pomp and circumstance surrounding evil and genocide in the twentieth century are nearly four hundred years distant. For the time being, in the year 1561, Nuremberg is a picturesque, almost idyllic late-medieval Bavarian city.  It is filled with buildings of stately fairy tale-like architecture, surrounded by verdant and productive farmland and is walled in on all sides for protect...

Palace at Knossos         "Now in the island of Atlantis there existed a confederation of Kings of great and marvelous power which held sway over all the island and many other islands."                                 -Plato from Timaeus the year 360 BCE           For two years the team of Italian archaeologists has been laboring in the hot sun on the island of Crete in the middle of the Aegean Sea.  Though the waters surrounding the island are a deep and lovely blue the heat is oppressive, the work is tedious and the local inhabitants are suspicious at best and openly hostile at their worst. It is July 1908 and the team has been excavating palace sites across the island, trying to piece together information and artifacts about a little known, but apparently much advanced civilization--the Minoans. The Min...

                    On the Monday after Easter all work and farming in the Medieval English village comes to a halt.  The town is completely quiet.  Yesterday had been spent in church; in prayerful reflection on the divine mystery of Christ’s sacrifice, but today is being spent in relaxation for the old and on playful flirtatious diversion for the young. With the early springtime sun shining down, birds twittering in the trees and a gentle breeze blowing in the air about two dozen teenagers, young men and women in the prime of life, gather in an open field. Four of them are carrying stools.  The four stools are arranged on the field in a circle with each stool being placed, approximately, twenty yards away from the other.   One young maiden stands in front of one of the stools with a flattened stick, a bat, in her hands.  A young man, possibly a potential suitor, stands in the middle of the...