Creative History

He has been employed as a silk weaver, and fittingly enough, Gaetano Bresci has traveled all the way from Paterson--New Jersey’s ‘Silk City’-- to the land of his birth, a small resort town called Monza located just outside of Milan in northern Italy. It is mid-afternoon on July 29, 1900. Gaetano Bresci is a thirty year old Italian-American immigrant; he’s married to an Irish-American woman named Sophie Kneiland who grew up in Hoboken, with whom he has fathered  two young daughters.  Despite being a devout family man, which by all accounts Gaetano Bresci most definitely was, he is also an anarchist. He had immigrated to New Jersey several years before after running afoul of Italian legal authorities for publishing supposedly dangerous and insurrectionist anarchist literature.  Bresci eventually settled in Paterson, New Jersey, a hotbed of anarchist meetings and activity in the United States, where he was able to not only continue to carry on his war against all world...

He had said to random passersby, “I’ll be damned if I don’t do it.”  Those are the words of unemployed house painter Richard Lawrence on the day that he attempted to assassinate the President of the United States. January 30, 1835 was a cold and misty day in our nation’s capital.  On that day freezing rain hung in the air and dark and ominous clouds encircled the then domeless rotunda of the United States Capitol building.  It would be over another 30 years, after the end of the American Civil War and after another of our nation’s Presidents had been murdered, that the dome on the Capitol building would finally be completed.   But on that day in 1835 then controversial President of the United States Andrew Jackson was on the steps of the Capitol building to attend the funeral of Representative Warren R. Davis of South Carolina who had unexpectedly passed away just a few days prior and whose body now lay in state on the porch of the Capitol building. Presid...

  As King Louis Philippe I of France, led by his entourage of hundreds of troops and officials, rides down the Boulevard du Temple in Paris, past a throng of thousands of adoring citizens, a loud ear-splitting explosion rends the air. It is the sound of twenty-five rifled muskets being fired simultaneously.  In an instant, eighteen people are killed, dozens are wounded and King Louis Philippe is grazed on the forehead by a bullet.  All of Paris is thrown into an uproar. Mere seconds after the great explosion, before the smoke has even cleared along the Boulevard du Temple, a crazed man with blood streaming down his face and his hands burnt black by fire, leaps from the third story window of his tiny one room apartment at Number 50 Boulevard du Temple.  He attempts to flee by sprinting into the confused and shocked crowd that has gathered around the dead and dying as a result of his bizarre assasination attempt. Before Giuseppe Marco Fieschi can even reach the s...