Creative History

He had said to random passersby, “I’ll be damned if I don’t do it.”  Those are the words of unemployed house painter Richard Lawrence on the day that he attempted to assassinate the President of the United States. January 30, 1835 was a cold and misty day in our nation’s capital.  On that day freezing rain hung in the air and dark and ominous clouds encircled the then domeless rotunda of the United States Capitol building.  It would be over another 30 years, after the end of the American Civil War and after another of our nation’s Presidents had been murdered, that the dome on the Capitol building would finally be completed.   But on that day in 1835 then controversial President of the United States Andrew Jackson was on the steps of the Capitol building to attend the funeral of Representative Warren R. Davis of South Carolina who had unexpectedly passed away just a few days prior and whose body now lay in state on the porch of the Capitol building. Presid...

  During the 15th or 16th century, in Dublin, Ireland, there lived a drunkard whom everyone knew by the name of “Stingy” Jack.  Now, Jack was a well known alcoholic and a conman and many people in town flat out called him a liar.  It’s believed that his state of dissipation and dishonesty is what caused Jack to earn the nickname “Stingy” because if anyone either out of pity, or trickery, chose to trust Jack he would only let them down and thereby “sting” them either out of drink or simple negligence. Well, as the story goes, none other than the Devil himself found out about Stingy Jack’s reputation throughout Ireland.  Satan couldn’t believe that there could possibly be a drunken Irish Hell-raiser who was  worse than himself.  And so, one day it is reported, the Devil himself went down to Dublin to have a conversation with “Stingy” Jack. The night that the Devil came to talk with Jack, he was drunkenly stumbling around in the fields outside the city lim...