Creative History

On September 19, 1738 a four foot tall man strode into the Burlington, New Jersey Quaker meeting house with a purpose.  The Quaker meeting house in Burlington was the largest building between there and Philadelphia, and on this day when the little man with the big ambition walked in, the meeting house was packed with hundreds of the most influential men and women--a veritable who’s who of Quaker religious and secular leadership, in the colonies of Pennsylvania and New Jersey. The diminutive man was a well known local eccentric named Benjamin Lay.  Some people, those of a more religious bent among the Quaker faithful, claimed that Benjamin Lay was a prophet like a modern day eighteenth century John the Baptist.  Others among the Quaker faithful, probably the majority, thought Benjamin Lay was nothing more than a local crackpot who was best to be avoided.  For his part, Benjamin Lay didn’t care what anyone thought--he was on a mission to abolish slavery on this Septe...

Indiana’s Dunes National Park sits on the shores of Lake Michigan.  It is really nothing more than a large, desolate, sandy beach composed of over fifteen thousand square acres of constantly shifting sand dunes.  In 1876 well over one hundred years before this landscape became part of the National Park Service--that didn’t happen until 2009 and until then this place was known simply as “Indiana’s Dune Country”--it was the perfect place to hide away from the long arm of the law or even the perfect place to hide a dead body for that matter. In October of 1876 master counterfeiter Benjamin Boyd was jailed in the city of Joliet, Illinois at the state’s penitentiary after having come to the attention of Chicago law enforcement for--what else?--passing off fake bills.  Passing off fake bills, or counterfeiting was big business in the days after the American Civil War, in fact, it’s not a stretch to say that as the United States celebrated its centennial anniversary in 1876 th...

During 1916, at the height of the First World War, it seemed to most observers as if death and dying itself had become the permanent state of humanity. In February of that year French and German armies fought at the fortress city of Verdun in what, to this very day, still remains the largest and most deadly single battle in human history.  On July 1, 1916 more British soldiers were killed at the Battle of the Somme in one single hour than had been killed in all of the battles of the 19th century Napoleonic Wars combined. However, the most deadly killer that emerged from the muddy trenches of Belgium and France killed silently; couldn’t be seen or heard by anyone and spread across the entire world within a matter of a few years and continued to kill, perhaps for decades, after the guns of the Western Front had long since fallen silent. Today, thanks in part to the recent COVID-19 pandemic, even people without any interest in history at all know about the 1918 Spanish Flu pande...

A Watchmaker, a drifter, an injured man or a person with a cognitive disability--it didn’t matter.  No matter what Robert Hubert was--or may have been--in September of 1666 in the days just after the Great Fire of London had left most of England’s largest city a smoldering ruin, Robert Hubert was an immigrant; maybe a Catholic, a foreigner and what everyone at the time called a stranger.  Robert Hubert was a Frenchman who resided in England and for that reason he was considered a threat in September of 1666; a person who instantly became one of interest on account of his immigration status--a person who may have been responsible for the flaming holocaust that had just incinerated England’s seat of royal power--and who for that reason, was taken into custody by the King’s authorities in the days after the Great Fire of London. Robert Hubert arrived in London at the age of twenty six in the spring of 1666 only weeks prior to the outbreak of the Great Fire.  History does t...