Creative History

  It is the Saturday after Thanksgiving off the New England coast.  November 26, 1898. The sea is calm and temperatures are seasonably cool and crisp.  Weather stations all along the eastern seaboard note nothing out of the ordinary that day except for one thing: the color of the sky.  The sky that evening is yellow.  It is glowing with an ominous and almost surreal luminescence as the sun begins to set. Sailing Master, Joseph Kemp, employed aboard a steamship in Boston Harbor noted that the yellow sky off the coast of Massachusetts on November 26, 1898 looked like, “The greasiest evening you ever saw.” On that “greasy” evening two low pressure fronts, one charging eastward from the Great Lakes, and the other, a warm weather system moving northward from the Gulf of Mexico are about to collide off the Massachusetts coast and create one of the most ferocious and destructive nor’easters in American history. Late 19th century forecasters know through baromet...

  Monday, January 12, 1807.  About a quarter past four in the afternoon… A wooden cargo ship named the Delfs Welvaaren  (translated into English as “The Prosperity of Delft”) is docked near the city center in Leiden, Holland, at the mouth of the Rapenburg Canal.  Packed below decks into the hold of the Delf Welvaaren are 369 barrels, or approximately 37,000 lbs of highly combustible black powder. This volatile cargo, a mixture of sulfur, carbon and potassium nitrate, the oldest known explosive chemical composition on earth, is in Leiden awaiting transport to Holland’s main military armory in the southern Dutch city of Delft. It will never get there. On the morning of the 12th of January 1807, mere hours before disaster, the Delf Welvaaren’s Captain received word that his ship won’t be able to proceed to Delft immediately because the other ship’s in the convoy are still icebound in the North Atlantic due to inclement winter weather.   Adam van Sc...

  By February 7, 1951 Captain Lewis Millet of the United States Army was already a hardened warrior.  He is a seasoned veteran of combat in two of America’s major wars.   Millet served with distinction in Italy during the Second World War, and now, at the still tender age of 31 Captain Millet is on his second tour of duty in Korea. In the cold snowy dawn, on a barren hillside near the 38th parallel, labelled as Hill 180 on military maps, outside a town called Anyang in South Korea, a platoon of American infantrymen is pinned down by ferocious Chinese mortar and machine gun fire. Unable to move forward, the beleaguered American troops scrape at the frozen ground with entrenching tools and attempt to press their bodies into the earth to avoid being killed by the relentless Chinese fire which is falling on them like rain from the entrenched and fortified Communist positions atop Hill 180. After beating back the North Korean invasion of the South in the summer of 1...