Creative History

Still called the Old Stone Mill by many locals to this day, the Newport Tower--a famed landmark in Newport, Rhode Island--sits just off the coast of Narragansett Bay in Touro Park.  It rises to a height of twenty-eight feet and is roughly circular in nature, though contrary to popular belief, it is not a true circle.  Located on a hilltop, it was once clearly visible to passing ships far out in Narragansett Bay, though construction in Newport during the twentieth century has since obscured most views of the Tower from out at sea.  It is built on land that was once owned by the family of the first Governor of Rhode Island and his eponymously named great grandson, the famous Revolutionary War traitor, Benedict Arnold. Traditionally, it has been believed that construction of the Tower occurred sometime during the 1660’s and that it was used as some sort of windmill, examples of which are common in England to this day--hence the name that many locals still use of the Old St...

With the arrival of the Pilgrims at Plymouth in 1620 reports began to reach King James I of England regarding the state of the inhabitants on the coast of New England.  These reports pointed out the desolate nature of the landscape and related tales from the native inhabitants that spoke of a great plague which had only recently visited them and had so utterly decimated their once healthy and vibrant communities by bringing death and disease.  The indigenous peoples themselves had named this mysterious curse of death and suffering, “The Great Dying”. King James I--renowned for his staunch Puritanism and not exactly sympathetic to the sufferings of native peoples whom he considered to be ungodly heathens--wrote of the reports that he had received, and rather happily related that, “Within these late years, there hath by God’s Visitation reigned a Wonderful Plague that has caused the utter devastation, destruction and depopulation of these lands.”  The lands that the King of...

By July 4, 1857 New York City had been in a nearly perpetual state of civil unrest for over a month, but on that night, as fireworks exploded overhead and thousands gathered in the city’s densely packed dusty and narrow streets to celebrate America’s independence in the midst of the mid-summer heat and humidity--the Big Apple exploded into an outright gang war. On America’s eighty-first birthday, only a mere three years before secession and then Civil War would tear the nation apart, New York City’s two largest underworld gangs--The Dead Rabbits and the Bowery Boys--each representing two distinct neighborhoods; two distinct versions of Christianity; and two distinct versions of what each gang believed it meant to be a “real” American, traded gunfire and fought hand to hand with knives and clubs, while Manhattan’s poorest citizens--those recently arrived by the thousands from Ireland, free African-Americans many only recently having escaped bondage in the south and those who could only ...

There are purported to be miles of tunnels, and even an unused burial crypt, deep beneath the United States Capitol Building in Washington D.C..  After Congress passed something called the Residence Act in July of 1790, which decreed that an inauspicious sixty square miles, or so, of swampland on the border between Maryland and Virginia would be rechristened as the District of Columbia and chosen as the Capital city of the brand new United States of America, our founding fathers--congressmen all themselves---set to work and designed this subterranean world. Throughout history many fringe theorists have asserted that the miles of tunnels and rooms beneath our nation’s capital are somehow linked with the mysterious rites of freemasonry and other secret societies for the rich, powerful and well-to-do who hope to keep their activities hidden from the prying eyes of the American public.  But one fact about this underground world is known, and that is that when work began on the b...

  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...