Creative History

  At the end of the eighteenth century between 1788 and 1790 there was a man on the loose roaming  the streets of London who attacked unsuspecting beautiful aristocratic women at will.  The penny press of the Georgian Era quickly dubbed the assailant “The London Monster” and over fifty such attacks were reported in just under a two year span.             The London Monster became a cause celebre almost overnight.  Armed vigilante groups formed in all of the city's neighborhoods; well known politicians, authors, actors and entertainers all called upon the city government to do something, anything , to capture the fiend that was terrorizing London's most lovely ladies and bring him (or them) to justice. All of the city’s well-to-do ladies were up in arms and sent into a near panic, the likes of which would not be equaled again until the 1880’s during Jack the Ripper’s reign of murderous terror.  The wor...

            Friday morning begins normally enough.  It is cloudy and overcast, a little gloomy with a slight chill in the air but it is nothing that the residents of New England aren’t used to.  After all, this time of year the temperature does fluctuate rapidly, with one day being warm and humid, summerlike, and the next cold and stark almost like winter. It is May 19, 1780 and the New England and Mid-Atlantic states have been in the grip of America’s War for Independence for over five years.  Much of the countryside is ravaged, many of the cities are still under British control, but led by George Washington, the Continental Army of the United States continues to survive and the spirit of American patriotism is proving resilient and indomitable.  There is reason for both hope and despair, but no one expects what this day is about to bring. At around ten in the morning the overcast sky begins to change colors turning from a pi...

“They were merely walking skeletons without clothes to cover their nakedness...covered with lice and vermin from head to foot.” --Captain Alexander Coffin prisoner aboard HMS Jersey 1781 As day breaks you can see it rising like a flat-topped hill in the distance.  The gutted hulk sitting there motionless and sunk in the mudflats of Wallabout Bay that you’ve heard about in rumors, the most infamous of rumors, among men in the army.  Your heart rate quickens as your footsteps take you closer. While you’re still over two hundred yards away from it, already, you can smell it.  The stench of the combined filth and decay of over 1,000 starving and dying men being lifted to your nostrils as it’s borne aloft by the early morning breeze. Your knees tremble.  You feel faint and think of running away.  But one glance to the right and left and you see the Redcoats standing guard over you and you realize that any attempt at escape will end either with a British b...