Creative History

            The count begins one...two... But before the count of three is reached United States Senator from California David C. Broderick’s Belgian made .58 caliber pistol misfires harmlessly into the dirt at his feet. Standing ten paces away from Broderick is former California State Supreme Court Justice, and one time close personal friend of Broderick’s, David S. Terry. Despite the mishap Broderick continues to stand tall.  On the count of three Terry doesn’t flinch and instantly pulls the trigger. Terry has taken aim directly at Broderick’s chest and when he fires the bullet instantly enters the Senator’s lungs. Weeks later at his trial Terry will claim that he, “only intended to graze him with a flesh wound,” but most who witnessed the duel will claim under oath that Supreme Court Justice Terry shot with intent to kill. The mortally wounded David C. Broderick is rushed to a waterfront house on San Francisco’s Black Point Beach. ...

The Babad Lombok is an 800 year old chronicle written on palm leaves by the indigenous peoples of the Indonesian island of Lombok. Today the island of Lombok is home to over three million people.  Lombok’s prime tropical location makes the remote volcanic island one of Indonesia’s most popular tourist destinations. However, nearly eight centuries ago, in the year 1257, the tropical paradise of Lombok was the site of one of the most powerful and destructive volcanic eruptions in recorded history--the eruption of Mount Samalas. The Babad Lombok  Scientists believe that the Samalas eruption may have registered as a 7 on the modern day Volcanic Explosivity Index, or VEI, which would make Samalas the most powerful eruption in the past 12 millenia. In an instant, sometime most probably in the autumn of 1257, ten square miles of the top of Mount Samalas literally exploded and shot as high as twenty-five miles into the sky.  Ash from the 1257 eruption of the Samalas volca...

            The heat sets in on July 4, 1911 and it stays for ten deadly days. An estimated 5,000 to 6,000 people will die from Pennsylvania to Maine as a result of the 1911 Heat Wave.  Many, in an age before air conditioning, widespread electric fans or refrigeration,  will succumb to heat exhaustion.   Others, living in cramped urban tenements and driven to madness by the unrelenting heat and humidity, will take their own lives to escape the stifling temperatures. An elderly man in Boston named Jacob Seeger takes a revolver and blows out his brains inside his rented room just to find relief from the heat. In Hartford, Connecticut twenty-eight year old Italian immigrant John Merlo, climbs to the roof of his boarding house in the middle of the night to try and find relief from the heat on the roof as he sleeps.  In the morning pedestrians find his body bloody and with its neck broken on the concrete sidewalk below.  Me...

  As King Louis Philippe I of France, led by his entourage of hundreds of troops and officials, rides down the Boulevard du Temple in Paris, past a throng of thousands of adoring citizens, a loud ear-splitting explosion rends the air. It is the sound of twenty-five rifled muskets being fired simultaneously.  In an instant, eighteen people are killed, dozens are wounded and King Louis Philippe is grazed on the forehead by a bullet.  All of Paris is thrown into an uproar. Mere seconds after the great explosion, before the smoke has even cleared along the Boulevard du Temple, a crazed man with blood streaming down his face and his hands burnt black by fire, leaps from the third story window of his tiny one room apartment at Number 50 Boulevard du Temple.  He attempts to flee by sprinting into the confused and shocked crowd that has gathered around the dead and dying as a result of his bizarre assasination attempt. Before Giuseppe Marco Fieschi can even reach the s...