Creative History

  By sundown a crowd of over 10,000 people had gathered in Boston’s Scollay Square.  As the sun dropped below the horizon and the day’s light faded into darkness the looting and rioting began. Within moments, on the night of September 9, 1919, the professors and undergraduate students from nearby Harvard University that had been hastily sworn in and pressed into service as temporary police officers by Boston’s Mayor Andrew James Peters were completely overwhelmed. Scollay Square, then the main city square in Boston and home to the city’s vibrant commercial downtown in 1919, and today the site of Boston’s City Hall Plaza, quickly became the epicenter of rioting and looting in the wake of the Boston Police Department Strike of 1919. That night, September 9, 1919, and on into the next night, rowdy young people threw rocks through shop windows, looted storefronts, overturned streetcars and smashed vendor stalls in an orgy of destruction.  Without a professional police...

  On August 23, 1567 a young Queen Elizabeth I of England issued a Royal Proclamation.  She decreed that there would be held: A VERY RICH LOTTERIE GENERALL WITHOUT ANY BLANKES. Instantly, on the heels of the Queen’s Proclamation, hundreds of posters five feet high and twenty inches wide advertising both ticket prices and the potential prizes that could be won were plastered on doorways and walls throughout London.  Lottery broadsheets detailing how tickets could be bought were rushed into print and passed from hand to hand among England’s aristocracy. Queen Elizabeth’s decree established the first national lottery in the history of the western world and it was this “Lotterie Generall” that is the true antecedent to all major lotteries that are held on a weekly basis throughout the world today. Each ticket for Queen Elizabeth’s lottery cost ten shillings, or about the equivalent of a year’s wages for the average laborer in 1567.  First prize was to be 5000 Pou...

  On the night of April 19, 1904 the temperature in Toronto, Ontario Canada plummeted to 25 degrees Fahrenheit and snow flurries started to fall throughout the city with wind gusts in excess of thirty miles per hour. At just after 8 o’clock that night a city police constable, making his nightly rounds downtown on foot, noticed smoke seeping from the windows of a tie factory located at 58 Wellington Street West, what then was considered the industrial and commercial heart of the city. A fire had begun in the elevator shaft of the E & S Currie Limited men’s neckwear factory.  This was the start of the Great Fire of Toronto of 1904. It would take nine full hours for the fire to burn itself out.  Before all was said and done over 100 buildings would be completely destroyed by fire that night.  Flames could be seen leaping into the sky for miles around and fire companies from Buffalo, New York and the nearby city of Hamilton all responded in a vain attempt to ...

  General Daniel Sickles, former Democratic congressman from New York, eccentric aristocrat and Corps Commander has a mixed reputation among his fellow officers in the Union Army. His erratic behavior throughout his life, and during the war, has earned him the unflattering nickname of “Devil Dan” Sickles. Most call him a political General and many believe that it is only his connections with the Tammany Hall Democratic political machine of New York City that have earned him his officer’s commission.   In 1863, on the eve of the Battle of Gettysburg, he was the only Corps Commander in the entire Union Army without a West Point education. In early 1862, as rumors about his sanity swirled around Washington, Sickles was forced to give up his position in the army when Congress refused to endorse his commission because many of his peers considered him mentally unfit for command. General Daniel Sickles was a murderer--albeit an acquitted one. General Sickles with his S...