Creative History

    At nine in the morning on the 27th of August 1896 the British Consul’s ultimatum to the Sultanate of Zanzibar expired. Two minutes later three battle cruisers and two gunboats of the Royal Navy backed by a contingent of one-hundred fifty Royal Marines and nine-hundred pro-British Zanzibaris begin a ferocious bombardment and assault on the Sultan’s Palace complex. There is a brief naval engagement.  The two British cruisers under the command of Admiral Harry Rawson launch an attack on the lone enemy boat that patrols the waters of Zanzibar’s harbor.  The boat is a royal yacht named the HMS Glasgow and it was gifted to the island state of Zanzibar by Queen Victoria herself. British shells cause the boat to founder and sink in the shallow waters of the harbor.  The HMS Glasgow gets stuck in the mud with only its masts showing above the waterline.  The sultan’s crew, servants  he has forcibly staffed aboard the yacht, wave a British Union Jack flag f...

            The evil queen commands the huntsman, “Kill her and as proof that she is dead bring her lungs and liver back to me.” The huntsman doesn’t kill her.  Instead, he sets out into the forest and slaughters a wild boar.  He brings the liver and lungs of the boar back to the evil queen and his ruse works. Greedily, the evil queen devours the entrails that the huntsman brings to her in a frenzy of cannibalistic ecstasy. In a few years, a magic mirror tells the queen that she has been deceived by the huntsman, and she sets out once again to kill the young maiden.  This time she believes she has accomplished her goal after pretending to be a farmer’s wife and convincing the maiden to eat a poisoned apple. But the queen has been fooled yet again.  The girl did not die.  The poisoned apple has only caused her to lapse into a sort of coma after becoming lodged in her throat.  Her seven companions, all suffering fr...

  Dozens of war canoes of the Susquehannock Nation, long hollowed out tree trunks, gather on the New Jersey side of the Hudson River. On the night of September 15, 1655 the unsuspecting residents of New Amsterdam across the Hudson, the river they call the North River at the time, have no idea what awaits them as the morning approaches. Six-hundred Susquehannock warriors armed with flintlock muskets, tomahawks and flaming torches fill the dozens of war canoes and resolutely row them towards the tip of lower Manhattan and Staten Island. The warriors are seeking retribution and recompense for what the Dutch have just done.  Only days before the Dutch under the command of Peter Stuyvesant had conquered the Susquehannock’s largest trading partner in the area, the colony of New Sweden and now they control not only New Amsterdam and all European settlements along the Hudson River, but the Netherlands can also claim all of present day southern New Jersey for their burgeoning c...

  “Nowadays there is no such animal as a noncombatant.  Modern warfare is total warfare.”  -German Zeppelin Corp Commander Peter Strasser (1915) Some claim that they can hear an eerie throbbing sound in the skies above London that night.  A few look up and can faintly make out a large cigar shaped shadow slowly drifting across the night sky high above the city.  The police have been forewarned.  Observers had spotted the massive airship floating over the coast of England only mere moments before.  The enormous hydrogen filled zeppelin, over 650 feet in length, is flying at approximately eighty miles per hour at an altitude of 16,000 feet.  An altitude too high for any anti-aircraft fire to reach. All that the police can do is to frantically pedal bicycles through the streets of London, blowing on whistles as they go, and shouting, “Take cover!  Take cover!” to passersby.  Some heed the warnings and huddle in basements.  Those ...