Creative History

  The temperature in Central Park first dropped below zero degrees Fahrenheit at 9 pm on Thursday, February 8, 1934 and it kept dropping for ten straight hours! Just after sunrise, at 7 in the morning on Friday, February 9, 1934, the National Weather Service officially recorded the temperature in New York City as -15 degrees Fahrenheit. The New York Times would report the next day that the temperature in Central Park was, in fact, a balmy -14.3 degrees at 7 o’clock in the morning. February 9, 1934 was, and still is, the coldest day on record for New York City and it’s metropolitan area.  Since accurate temperature data first started to be recorded by the National Weather Service at Central Park in 1871, there have been 58 days during which the temperature has been at or below zero degrees Fahrenheit in midtown Manhattan, with the most recent of these days being January 18, 1994 when the temperature reached -2 degrees. But February 9, 1934 still remains the coldest o...

  “Suddenly the sky was split in two...the whole northern part of the sky was covered with fire.  There was a bang in the sky and a mighty crash.  The earth trembled.” - from an eyewitness account of the Tunguska Event recorded in 1927 . The night sky glowed an eerie phosphorescent blue from the fire of the explosion.  It was reported that the dark sky was so illuminated by what happened that night over northern Siberia that people as far away as China could read a newspaper outdoors at midnight. It sent shockwaves all across Europe and Asia.  In London and Washington D.C. seismographs registered the event as a small magnitude earthquake.  The sound could be heard as far away as St. Petersburg and the explosion is said to have broken glass in Moscow.  Within hundreds of miles of the epicenter dust particles thrown into the atmosphere blotted out the sun for days. On the morning of June 30, 1908 there was a massive explosion that occurred over wha...

  Gevaudan is the historical name for France’s most sparsely populated region.  Located in the south central part of the country, Gevaudan is today part of the Haute-Loire area which is named after the Loire River and is known for its hilly terrain and wide woodland expanses. Much like today, when the population of what once was named the county of Gevaudan, still numbers only around 75,000 residents, three hundred years ago the Gevaudan region was home to widely separated farming villages, shepherds and close-knit devoutly Catholic communities often prone to superstition and suspicion  of outsiders. “The region is sublime...a remote isolated backwater where the forces of nature have not been fully tamed, where the forests indeed were enchanted,” wrote historian and folklorist Jay M. Smith when describing the Gevaudan region in his 2011 work entitled Monsters of the Gevaudan: The Making of the Beast published by Harvard University Press. Between the years 1764 and ...

  First the screen flickered and then it went completely black. At 9:14 pm on November 22, 1987, during the sports segment of the WGN nine o’clock newscast, the largest broadcast network in the Chicago metropolitan area, went completely off the air.   Local sportscaster Dan Roan, who had at that moment been in the middle of narrating highlights from that day’s game between the Chicago Bears and Detroit Lions disappeared from the screen. There was a buzzing sound over the airwaves and then after nearly half a minute of complete darkness an almost comically grotesque head appeared on screen. The WGN newscast was interrupted by a man wearing a rubber mask and oversized sunglasses whose head bobbed around erratically in front of a gray metallic looking background. WGN, the largest broadcast network at the time in Chicago, had its airwaves interrupted and hijacked by someone attempting to impersonate artificial intelligence character, and pop culture icon, Max Headroom. Max He...