Creative History

  The evening of December 22, 1909 was clear but definitely cold enough to snow as temperatures dipped well below freezing once the sun set that afternoon in Worcester, Massachusetts. Worcester at the end of the first decade of the 20th century despite being known as a statewide transportation hub, and the largest city in central Massachusetts, was still predominantly a walking city.  Some automobiles had already begun to clog the newly paved streets of the city and illuminate passersby with their headlights on the night of December 22, 1909 but as workers rushed home from factories and offices and headed out to the shops in Worcester’s busy downtown to buy last minute Christmas gifts for their kids, the majority of them still travelled by foot and the sidewalks that night were packed with pedestrians. At exactly 6:45 just as the holiday shopping crowd was at its peak on that cold winter’s night in Worcester, over a thousand of the city’s inhabitants looked up in the nightti...

  When thinking about the aftermath of the Battle of Gettysburg--the largest battle ever fought in the western hemisphere--most of us can easily conjure up images of row upon row of white headstones laid out in perfect symmetry.   Many of us, if we think about the battle at all, may think of Victorian Era martial monuments made out of granite or marble, or of brass cannon and wooden fences scattered across lush Pennsylvania farmland.  And of course all of us learned as elementary school students, and we are always reminded whenever Gettysburg is mentioned, of President Abraham Lincoln and his famous address which he gave on the site of the battle in November of 1863 only a mere four months after the guns had fallen silent. But there is a more grisly and horrific side to the aftermath of the Battle of Gettysburg, aside from monuments, orderly cemeteries and Abraham Lincoln that few, if any of us, ever think about  today.  However, the horror of the after...

  The first Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade took place exactly one-hundred years ago in 1924.  And just like today’s annual holiday spectacle, this first incarnation of the iconic Thanksgiving Day Parade, marched straight down 34th Street in midtown Manhattan and ended outside of Macy’s flagship department store at Herald Square.     However, unlike today’s parade that is full of marching bands, celebrities, broadway dancers and larger than life inflatable balloons and ornate floats--that first Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade was composed entirely of Macy’s employees….and Santa of course!  But even the big guy in the red suit played a slightly different role in that first parade than he does today.  Rather than riding through midtown at the head of  a reindeer driven sleigh and waving at the throngs of onlookers who line the parade route, the Santa Claus of 1924 sat in a stately throne, was crowned “King of the Kiddies” by his elves (which sounds vaguely...

  In November of 1849, during the frenzied height of the California Gold Rush, a ship from Rio de Janeiro docked in San Francisco harbor and off of the gangplank stepped Joshua Abraham Norton--the future Emperor of the United States of America! Joshua Abraham Norton would one day proclaim himself to be the Emperor of the United States of America, however when he came ashore in late 1849 in the western frontier gold rush boomtown that was San Francisco, California at that time, no one in the city--not a single soul--had any idea who the hell he was.   If they had known who he was they most probably would have thought that he was an unmitigated failure at life who was running from his foggy and somewhat sketchy past, and like most of the hundreds of souls who arrived daily at the port of San Francisco, was seeking to strike it rich overnight at one of California’s many gold prospecting sites.  Had anyone known who Joshua Abraham Norton was when he arrived in San Franci...