Creative History

 In pubs and in farmer’s fields throughout the south of England in the late Summer and throughout the Fall of 1678 parchment broadsides, hastily folded paper pamphlets, were passed furtively from hand to hand.  These pamphlets were read in secret by everyone who could read at all during hastily snatched moments of respite from back-breaking labor, or they were read aloud from town squares for all to hear and for the benefit of the multitudes, many of whom were all but illiterate. During this unique moment in the late 17th century--at the birth of what would become the forerunner to print media--the story of the so-called “Mowing Devil” was going viral across all of England. The pamphlet which caused such a stir was entitled The Mowing Devil: Or,  Strange News Out of Hart-fordshire.  It was only five pages long in total and, even today, no one is certain whether any part of The Mowing Devil was true, or even intended to be true at all, but this small pamphlet certai...

  At one time, during the epoch in European history that is known today as the High Middle Ages, perhaps sometime between the year 1000 and 1100, the city of Klagenfurt which is located in present day southern Austria, was founded in the marshy wetlands and along the muddy banks of the River Glan.  The city was established by a wealthy and high-born Duke, and was protected by a veritable army of brave and heavily armed knights.   But, there was one problem with the founding of Klagenfurt.  The city was being threatened by a vicious, fire-breathing winged dragon.  The dragon, at least according to legend, prevented any outsiders from crossing the River Glan to enter the city and constantly ravaged the homes and properties of the townspeople with devastating floods. Klagenfurt is definitely an historic city, whose picturesque architecture, even today, gives the town a medieval feel.  The city itself  is not far, less than fifty miles in fact, fr...

  Sometime in the 1780’s, just after America had won its hard fought independence from Great Britain, a young Irishman returned home after several years abroad fighting with George Washington’s Continental Army. He had gone to the rebellious colonies several years before as little more than a boy, seeking to escape grinding poverty and an overbearing and mentally unstable mother back home in County Roscommon, Ireland.  While in America he had fought bravely; saved all of his money and grown into a man. Elizabeth Sugrue, the returning soldier’s estranged mother, was destitute and desperate.  Her husband, a hard-scrabble, abusive alcoholic and subsistence farmer had died unexpectedly several years before; her son had left home as a runaway for parts unknown and she had taken to drinking, petty theft and prostitution to survive.  She ran a boarding house in Roscommon city, which as all local residents knew, was in actuality little more than a thinly disguised brothel....

  During the 15th or 16th century, in Dublin, Ireland, there lived a drunkard whom everyone knew by the name of “Stingy” Jack.  Now, Jack was a well known alcoholic and a conman and many people in town flat out called him a liar.  It’s believed that his state of dissipation and dishonesty is what caused Jack to earn the nickname “Stingy” because if anyone either out of pity, or trickery, chose to trust Jack he would only let them down and thereby “sting” them either out of drink or simple negligence. Well, as the story goes, none other than the Devil himself found out about Stingy Jack’s reputation throughout Ireland.  Satan couldn’t believe that there could possibly be a drunken Irish Hell-raiser who was  worse than himself.  And so, one day it is reported, the Devil himself went down to Dublin to have a conversation with “Stingy” Jack. The night that the Devil came to talk with Jack, he was drunkenly stumbling around in the fields outside the city lim...

  Construction on the grand cathedral in Cologne, Germany, began in the year 1248--when the Mongol Empire ruled half of the known world and when a young Dominican Friar from Italy named Thomas Aquinas had just begun writing his Summa Theologica- -a comprehensive compendium of all Catholic thought up until that point in history. It would not be completed for over 600 more years until 1880--the year when electric streetlights were first installed in the United States of America, in the relatively small town of Wabash, Indiana surprisingly, and when Russian author Fyodor Dostoyevsky completed work on his final novel, The Brothers Karamazov , which was considered a magnum opus on the relatively new nineteenth century doctrines of modern Atheism and Agnosticism. Cologne Cathedral is one of Europe’s finest surviving examples of gothic architecture from the High Middle Ages and was declared a World Heritage Site in 1996.  According to Wikipedia, Cologne Cathedral is Germany’s most ...