Creative History

  It was a bitterly cold winter’s night in February of 1698.  The wind howled and the ground was frozen solid as she stumbled over tree roots unable to see at all in the dense underbrush; injured and scorned, lost and banished to the woodlands outside of town.   There was no one around to help for miles.   This time of the year, when night came early and darkness fell across the Maryland countryside like an evil pall, all of the settlers huddled around their hearths, indoors, and prayed  so that even if someone had wanted to help her, which they most assuredly did not, they would have been too afraid to come outside on this most inauspicious of winter nights anyway.  Every citizen of nearby Leonardtown was a devout Catholic whose ancestors had immigrated to the safe haven of Maryland in order to escape religious persecution at the hands of Protestants in England and western Europe, or they were recently arrived Puritans whose relatives only a few ...

  February 15, 1894 was a brisk winter’s day in late-Victorian Era London. At around 5 o'clock in the afternoon a cold hazy setting sun still hung in the sky and glowed--a dull orange orb suspended in air--like the light of a flickering candle about to be extinguished over Greenwich Park just outside the city center and home to the Royal Greenwich Observatory. The Royal Observatory was located on a prominent hill southeast of downtown London in the affluent suburb of Greenwich and overlooked the bustling River Thames--the lifeline of the late 19th century British Empire.  The Royal Greenwich Observatory (RGO) founded by King Charles II in 1675 literally split the known world in half.  It is the Prime Meridian; the spot on the planet earth from which longitude and the passing of time are measured and which to this very day gives us Greenwich Mean Time and the dates on our calendars. Today, the RGO is a tourist attraction located in an urban parklike setting that attrac...

  On the night of August 31, 1944 in the town of Mattoon, Illinois, Urban Reef, a sheet metal worker, who has lived most of his adult life in the same small ranch-style house located at 1817 Grant Avenue is awakened by a strange and pungent odor. He rises out of his bed to investigate but instantly becomes nauseous and weak in the knees.  He drops to the floor of his bedroom and starts to retch and vomit.  His wife, fearing that she may have accidentally left the stove on after cooking dinner only a few hours before, attempts to get up out of bed to go to the kitchen, but she finds that she is paralyzed from the neck down and unable to get up out of the bed at all.  While her husband vomits on the floor Mrs. Reef feels as if a heavy weight is pressing down on her chest and she is forced to lay there inert and completely immobile. Only a few hours later in the early morning of September 1, 1944, and only a few blocks away from where Mr. and Mrs Reef suffered their...

  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 ...