Creative History

  On February 9, 1889 in front of a crowd of 1200 bemused bedouins, none of whom had any idea what the Hell they were watching--in the shadow of the Great Pyramid of Giza and beneath the gaze of the sphinx--the Chicago White Stockings and a team of professional all stars called the All Americans played a baseball game amidst the shifting sands of the Egyptian desert. This was part of Albert G. Spalding’s World Tour of Baseball which had begun in October of the previous year and would stretch into April, nearly until opening day, of the 1889 professional baseball season.  The World Tour included stops in Australia, Hawaii where baseball was played before half-naked natives and their indigenous king, England where games were watched by an aging Queen Victoria, Ceylon modern day Sri Lanka in front of groups of Buddhist monks, and Italy where baseball games were played by American major leaguers before papal emissaries outside of the Vatican in the shadow of the Roman Colosseum....

  On August 21, 1835 a shocking advertisement ran in the New York Sun .  It read in big bold letters at the very top of the broadsheet: GREAT ASTRONOMICAL DISCOVERIES LATELY MADE By Sir John Herschel  At the Cape of Good Hope… This advertisement in one of New York City’s leading newspapers of the time told readers about an upcoming series of six feature articles that the paper would run over the course of the next week which would detail the discovery and existence of life on the moon! With the running of this advertisement in block letters on the front page of the New York Sun, the Great Moon Hoax of 1835 was on. These feature articles, which would be published over the course of the following six days, one each day which supposedly detailed a different aspect of life and civilization on the moon, were attributed to the Edinburgh Courant of Scotland.  The Edinburgh Courant was Scotland’s oldest, and most well respected newspaper, dating back all the way to 1705....

  In the late 17th century,  when New York City was still known to many as Neue Amsterdam, having only recently fallen under British control in 1664; when the Hudson River was still called the North River and the Delaware River was still referred to as the South River, there was a settlement known as Communipaw, on the New Jersey side of the harbor then referred to as the colony of Bergen. Even today, in what is modern day Jersey City, there’s still a neighborhood along the waterfront near Liberty Island sitting in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty that is known as Communipaw.   It is considered to be Jersey City’s oldest neighborhood. In 1896 American author and folklorist Charles M. Skinner, a native New Yorker himself, published a work entitled Myths and Legends of Our Own Land .  In this work he recounted a story called “The Party from Gibbet Island”.  This story centered around the colonial community of Communipaw in present day New Jersey. ...