Creative History

  The founding charter of the Wenlock Olympian Games, written by a group of concerned citizens who wished, above all else, to improve their small town’s physical and moral health stated that the Games were established for, “the promotion of the moral, physical and the intellectual improvement of the inhabitants of the town and neighborhood of Wenlock and especially of the working classes, by the encouragement of outdoor recreation and by the award of prizes annually at public meetings for skill in Athletic exercise and proficiency in intellectual and industrial attainments.”   The founding charter of the Wenlock Olympian games was authored by members of a group that called themselves the Wenlock Agricultural Reading Society (WARS) in February of 1850 and its main aim was to establish something, in a true Victorian Era caste-system way of thinking that they called “The Olympian Class”.  Though, the idea of creating a so-called Olympian Class of citizens to us today conjures up images

  When the Continental Congress convened to declare independence from Great Britain during the summer of 1776 things were not looking all that good for the newly minted United States of America. To most observers, both at home and abroad, it seemed as if the upstart Continental Army was about to crumble any day now.  New York City would soon fall to the British army in August and George Washington’s dwindling forces would, that very summer, be sent into headlong retreat across the embattled colony of New Jersey.  It could be said that when the delegates met in Philadelphia to declare independence that a sense of fatalism gripped them all.  It was the venerable and erstwhile Benjamin Franklin who legend has it joked about all of the American leaders ending their days swaying from the end of a British noose. Several hundred miles north of Philadelphia during that July of 1776 in upstate New York near the Canadian border, American General Benedict Arnold then considered to be a patrio