Creative History

            The heat sets in on July 4, 1911 and it stays for ten deadly days. An estimated 5,000 to 6,000 people will die from Pennsylvania to Maine as a result of the 1911 Heat Wave.  Many, in an age before air conditioning, widespread electric fans or refrigeration,  will succumb to heat exhaustion.   Others, living in cramped urban tenements and driven to madness by the unrelenting heat and humidity, will take their own lives to escape the stifling temperatures. An elderly man in Boston named Jacob Seeger takes a revolver and blows out his brains inside his rented room just to find relief from the heat. In Hartford, Connecticut twenty-eight year old Italian immigrant John Merlo, climbs to the roof of his boarding house in the middle of the night to try and find relief from the heat on the roof as he sleeps.  In the morning pedestrians find his body bloody and with its neck broken on the concrete sidewalk below.  Me...