Creative History

  Construction on the grand cathedral in Cologne, Germany, began in the year 1248--when the Mongol Empire ruled half of the known world and when a young Dominican Friar from Italy named Thomas Aquinas had just begun writing his Summa Theologica- -a comprehensive compendium of all Catholic thought up until that point in history. It would not be completed for over 600 more years until 1880--the year when electric streetlights were first installed in the United States of America, in the relatively small town of Wabash, Indiana surprisingly, and when Russian author Fyodor Dostoyevsky completed work on his final novel, The Brothers Karamazov , which was considered a magnum opus on the relatively new nineteenth century doctrines of modern Atheism and Agnosticism. Cologne Cathedral is one of Europe’s finest surviving examples of gothic architecture from the High Middle Ages and was declared a World Heritage Site in 1996.  According to Wikipedia, Cologne Cathedral is Germany’s most ...

  Famous for its unpredictable high tides and majestic cliffs, Canada’s Bay of Fundy straddles the border between the two northeastern provinces of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick.  The world’s fifth largest bay in terms of  square miles, the Bay of Fundy also shares a border with the American state of Maine. The shifting tides in the Bay of Fundy are considered fierce and treacherous by even the most experienced mariners in the world.  And the weather in Nova Scotia, particularly along the shoreline can be fickle and in the winter downright frigid, with large floes and pack ice a not uncommon sight in the open waters of the Bay of Fundy throughout much of the year. On December 16, 1735 residents of the tiny rural fishing village of Chebogue, located along the northern shoreline of the Bay of Fundy, awoke on a cold winter’s morning to see a most unusual, even a haunting sight meet their eyes. Docked in the small harbor of their village that December morning was a t...

  The Horseshoe Brewery, owned by the business conglomerate Meux & Company was located at the junction of Tottenham Court Road and Oxford Street in London’s west end, a part of the parish of St. Giles, one of 19th century London’s most notorious slum neighborhoods. Today, what was once the site of the Horseshoe Brewery is home to the fashionable Dominion Theatre, and is now surrounded by upscale hotels and restaurants.  But back in 1814 the area, then known as St. Giles rookery, was a dense collection of closely packed tenement dwellings and slum cottages.  It was one of nineteenth century London’s poorest neighborhoods, home to thousands of destitute Irish immigrants who lived underground in densely packed dank cellars, or in large families crammed into small one room apartments with little ventilation and few accessible outdoor exits. On the afternoon of October 17, 1814 a seven hundred pound iron rung slipped from an enormous wooden vat containing approximately 1...

  November 30, 1876, Thanksgiving Day, is cold and wet in northern New Jersey.  Temperatures in Hoboken that early afternoon are near freezing, and an icy sleet is falling. About 1,000 fans have gathered outside on what is called the St. George’s Cricket Ground on this Thanksgiving Day to watch twenty-two collegiate athletes, eleven students from Princeton and eleven from Yale, faceoff in the first ever Thanksgiving Day American gridiron football game. Some sources say the game was played, like modern American football by teams of eleven-on-eleven, though others say that there may have been as many as fifteen players per side, but whatever the number, the game played on that cricket ground that day was unique enough to be considered something entirely different from other collegiate sports that were popular at the time such as rugby or soccer. Most who gathered at the local cricket grounds in Hoboken, New Jersey that day, were former alumni or simply curious spectators w...