Creative History

  “You just can’t imagine what it was like.  All of a sudden I saw Santa Claus!  I couldn’t believe my eyes...it was a dream come true!” - Recollection of a man in his 90’s on first seeing Santa recorded in 1976 It is December of 1890. Packed trains from Boston, Hartford, Providence--even from as far away as New York City--are piling into the small station in Brockton, Massachusetts. Brockton is an industrial, working class city located south of Boston in Plymouth County.  In the future this rough and tumble blue collar town will become famous as the home of heavyweight boxing champion Rocky Marciano, but in December of 1890 it has been suddenly put on the map as the home of Santa Claus! Each day hundreds of children and their parents walk down Main Street in Brockton, Massachusetts and head straight for Edgar’s Department Store. Edgar’s Department Store is owned by wealthy local philanthropist and entrepreneur James Edgar, who earlier that year had traveled to Boston and com

University of Virginia Halfback Julien Hill takes a handoff at the start of the second half of a game that is being touted as the southern championship of American football. It is October 30, 1897 and up to that point the much more talented University of Virginia team has been dominating its rivals from the University of Georgia on their own home turf in Atlanta. The Georgia faithful are becoming disappointed and fast losing hope.  Prior to kickoff the University of Georgia student newspaper The Red and Black had called this game, “the greatest athletic event that has ever occurred in the south.” In that same article the student newspaper also went on to say, “Every man on both teams realizes the fact that there is much at stake and each one will enter the game with a determination to win or die.” To Win or Die...little did the undergraduate journalist who penned that article realize how prescient those words would become on that Saturday afternoon in October of 1897. Hill t

  “The bald eagle is a bird of bad moral character.  He does not get his living honestly.  He is too lazy to fish for himself.” Those are the words of legendary, larger-than-life, founding father Benjamin Franklin.  Ben Franklin, both as a scientist and as a statesman, was the most famous and well-respected American in the entire world at the end of the 18th century during the early days of our American republic.   He, perhaps more than anyone else, is responsible for framing and shaping the laws and ideas that are articulated in the United States Constitution which have endured for nearly two-hundred and fifty years.  He was America’s first diplomat and was instrumental in winning American independence from Great Britain by negotiating international treaties that brought France and Holland into the American Revolution on our side and thereby tipped the balance of power against the British.  Franklin invented bifocals and experimented with electricity and in a very real sense he