Creative History

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...