Creative History

By July 4, 1857 New York City had been in a nearly perpetual state of civil unrest for over a month, but on that night, as fireworks exploded overhead and thousands gathered in the city’s densely packed dusty and narrow streets to celebrate America’s independence in the midst of the mid-summer heat and humidity--the Big Apple exploded into an outright gang war. On America’s eighty-first birthday, only a mere three years before secession and then Civil War would tear the nation apart, New York City’s two largest underworld gangs--The Dead Rabbits and the Bowery Boys--each representing two distinct neighborhoods; two distinct versions of Christianity; and two distinct versions of what each gang believed it meant to be a “real” American, traded gunfire and fought hand to hand with knives and clubs, while Manhattan’s poorest citizens--those recently arrived by the thousands from Ireland, free African-Americans many only recently having escaped bondage in the south and those who could only ...

  Under a sweltering equatorial sun, shackled around the neck and chained one to another at the ankles, on August 7, 1860 over 900 enslaved Africans were forced aboard the slave ship Erie docked near the mouth of the Congo River in west Africa. The imprisoned human cargo that had been kidnapped and sold into slavery, mostly children and young women, were led onto the ship at gunpoint and under the watchful eye of a thirty-four year old American slave trader originally from Portland, Maine (quite a distance from what would become the Confederate States of America) named Nathaniel Gordon. Writing for Scribner’s Magazine over forty years later in 1900 when mentioning the infamous slave trader Nathaniel Gordon in his scholarly article entitled, “The Slave Trade in America” historian John R. Spears would say of Gordon’s cargo aboard the Erie that, “Only 172 were men and 182 were women…Gordon preferred to carry children because they could not rise up to avenge his cruelties.” And l...

  On December 31, 1907 editor of the New York Times Alfred Ochs organized a New Year’s Eve celebration in front of his newspaper’s renowned headquarters at Times Square in midtown Manhattan. Thousands gathered that frigid winter’s night to watch a ball drop down a specially designed flagpole at 11:59 p.m. to welcome in the new year of 1908.   Millions of people from around the world have gathered at almost exactly that same spot every year for one-hundred and fifteen years to do almost exactly the same thing ever since. Though the ball itself has been updated many times over the course of the last century in accordance with advances in lighting technology-- the original ball was made of wood and iron and was covered in incandescent filament “Edison”light bulbs, and the current ball that will be dropped to welcome in 2023 in front of an estimated 1.1 million people is made entirely from Waterford Crystal and is covered in  over 32,000 LED lights--the actual event of...