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...

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...

  J. Robert Oppenheimer the scientist in charge of the Manhattan Project codenamed the test “Trinity” after a sonnet by Elizabethan poet John Donne--Holy Sonnet 14--famed for these lines: Batter my heart, three personed God, for you As yet but knock, breathe, shine and seek to mend That I may rise, and stand o’erthrow me and bend Your force to break , blow, burn and make me new…. A fitting and prophetic poem, indeed, for what the gathered scientists, military personnel and unwitting civilians in the desolate New Mexico desert witnessed on that July day in 1945--the destructive power of God harnessed by man for the first time in human history. The Trinity Test--the first successful detonation in history of a nuclear device on the planet earth--took place at exactly 5:29 in the morning Mountain Time, only moments after sunrise, on July 16, 1945.  It was the penultimate achievement of the Manhattan Project, which thousands of individuals had worked on so diligently at the cost ...

  It is April 12, 1955--a Tuesday, exactly ten years to the day after the death of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt who had served for over twelve years in the White House, but who also had spent most of his life crippled by polio. On this day, in 1955, Dr. Thomas Francis Jr.--a fifty-four year old virologist and epidemiologist from the University of Michigan who had been the first person in the United States to isolate a strain of the influenza virus back in 1940 which led to the development of the yearly flu vaccine--stands at a podium in a large auditorium before an assembled crowd of upwards of five-hundred reporters and scientists from around the world. One of Dr. Francis’ former students--Jonas Salk who is originally from New York City and the New York University School of Medicine--but who has been working at the University of Pittsburgh on research and development has made a major breakthrough in the development of a vaccine against the dreaded childhood disease of p...

  February 25, 1866--two men, James Mattson a gold miner and John Scribner a commissary store owner, Wells Fargo employee and part time miner himself, at a place called Angel’s Mining Camp in Calaveras County, California, are looking-- just like thousands of others among them who have recently headed west over the past decade and a half--to strike it rich by finding gold. As the men dig their mine down deeper and deeper beneath a layer of hardened lava from an extinct volcano and reach a depth of approximately 130 feet below the surface of the earth, Mattson’s pick hits something hard in a side wall of the mine.  At first, he thinks it’s simply a fossilized tree root, but the two men consider the item oddly shaped enough, and interesting enough, to bring it up to the surface anyway. At the end of the day, this hard and oddly shaped object is brought to the commissary store that is owned by John Scribner.  For days it sits in the store on a shelf and is largely ignored...