Creative History

  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...