Creative History

  J. Robert Oppenheimer the scientist in charge of the Manhattan Project codenamed the test “Trinity” after a sonnet by Elizabethan poet John Donne--Holy Sonnet 14--famed for these lines: Batter my heart, three personed God, for you As yet but knock, breathe, shine and seek to mend That I may rise, and stand o’erthrow me and bend Your force to break , blow, burn and make me new…. A fitting and prophetic poem, indeed, for what the gathered scientists, military personnel and unwitting civilians in the desolate New Mexico desert witnessed on that July day in 1945--the destructive power of God harnessed by man for the first time in human history. The Trinity Test--the first successful detonation in history of a nuclear device on the planet earth--took place at exactly 5:29 in the morning Mountain Time, only moments after sunrise, on July 16, 1945.  It was the penultimate achievement of the Manhattan Project, which thousands of individuals had worked on so diligently at the cost ...

  It is a movie that is aptly titled Roundhay Garden Scene because that is exactly what it is.  That is exactly ALL that it is--simply a movie of people walking in a garden that lasts for a whopping three seconds.  But what makes this mundane few seconds of grainy black and white footage of an English garden so remarkable is that Roundhay Garden Scene is believed to be the very first motion picture--the very first recorded moving images of human beings ever captured on film--in the history of the world. Roundhay Garden Scene was produced, filmed and directed by French born inventor and artist Louis Le Prince nearly one-hundred and forty years ago, at the height of the Victorian Era, on October 14, 1888 in Leeds, Yorkshire England at about the exact same time in history that the infamous serial killer Jack the Ripper was terrorizing the slums and working class neighborhoods of London. This three second film of formally dressed Victorian Era folk frolicking in an arist...

  The Puritans who settled in Boston during the early 17th century built a large wooden structure on Boston Common in around the year 1635 that they called The Granary.   Since there is little arable land surrounding Boston, the Granary was, arguably, the most important building in the city during many of the years prior to the American Revolution.  This large wooden warehouse, which stored mostly flour and corn, was the key to survival for Boston’s residents throughout the long months of the harsh and unforgiving New England winter when coastal shipping and fishing was perilous and very limited. By the year 1713, some seventy years after it had first been built, the same structure still stood in its original spot on Boston Common, but by that time the citizens of Boston--grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the city’s first settlers--had taken to calling the building, not without a slight touch of affection, “The Old Granary”. As the 18th century dawned, and...

  A few weeks before Easter in the year 1512 alarming reports began to reach Pope Julius II in Rome.  Reports of a strange and monstrous creature--a true demon (it was said) brought to life--near the Adriatic coast in the historic and holy city of Ravenna, only about two-hundred miles as the crow flies, north of the Vatican. This creature, what Vatican officials labelled as the spawn of Satan, was said to have been the illicit offspring of a secret sexual liaison between a nun and a monk.  In reality, if that was the case, then the so-called “Monster of Ravenna” never stood a chance of acceptance into Renaissance Italian society no matter what it looked like from the moment that it was born. This “monstrous” being would have been banished to the wilderness from infancy, shunned and pushed away to the margins of Renaissance society, only able to sustain a subsistence life if it were lucky, merely for having been the product of such a sinful sexual encounter. When Pop...