Creative History

  The media called it the “Fight for America” and like almost every single major prize fight ever since with high stakes involved, and even higher public interest, the bout was dubbed “The Fight of the Century”--the Fight of the 19th Century that is!   Ten thousand dollars and some would say the future of what it even meant to be called an “American” were on the line that day when on February 7, 1849 at a farm in Maryland, located forty miles from Baltimore on a desolate snow covered island, what the press called “The Fight for America” and what the public referred to as “The Fight of the Century” took place in front of less than 200 spectators, mostly gamblers and former fighters themselves, because at that time boxing despite its underground popularity, and its popularity as a legitimate sport in the United Kingdom, was illegal almost everywhere in the United States of America. It was definitely not an auspicious place or time of year to hold an outdoor boxing match...

  The first Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade took place exactly one-hundred years ago in 1924.  And just like today’s annual holiday spectacle, this first incarnation of the iconic Thanksgiving Day Parade, marched straight down 34th Street in midtown Manhattan and ended outside of Macy’s flagship department store at Herald Square.     However, unlike today’s parade that is full of marching bands, celebrities, broadway dancers and larger than life inflatable balloons and ornate floats--that first Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade was composed entirely of Macy’s employees….and Santa of course!  But even the big guy in the red suit played a slightly different role in that first parade than he does today.  Rather than riding through midtown at the head of  a reindeer driven sleigh and waving at the throngs of onlookers who line the parade route, the Santa Claus of 1924 sat in a stately throne, was crowned “King of the Kiddies” by his elves (which sounds vaguely...

  May Day, the 1st day of May, was typically  a day of feasting, festivity and celebration in early modern England.  Ordinarily, in London May Day was a day off from work for the laboring masses and a day to gather in the warm Spring sunshine for dancing and sport in the city’s narrow streets.  But, in London on the 1st of May during the fateful year of 1517, a day of celebration and revelry took on a much more sinister tone and became forever known to history as “Evil May Day”. On the night of May 1, 1517 a violent and drunken mob which numbered perhaps in the thousands took control of old London’s densely packed, muddy and narrow late-medieval city streets.  Fired by years of simmering rage over low wages and lack of meaningful employment, the angry mob sought to assault and in some instances even attempt to murder every member of London’s ever growing foreign born immigrant population that they could find. At that time in Tudor England during the reign of...