Matthew Wills has advanced degrees in library science and film studies and is lapsed in both fields. He has published in Poetry, Huffington Post, and Nature Conservancy Magazine, among other places, and blogs regularly about urban natural history at matthewwills.com.
Investigators never reached a conclusion about the death of Pullman porter J. H. Wilkins, but his killing revealed much about the dangers of his profession.
British abolition in 1833 was accompanied by £20 million paid in compensation to slaveholders, many of whom subsequently "forgot" slavery ever existed.
The first French nuclear bomb test took place in the Sahara in 1960 in the midst of the Algerian War, but French history doesn’t connect the two events.
Reentry of space junk in the 1970s forced First Nations communities into a reckoning with Cold War geopolitics and a burgeoning envirotechnical disaster.
Political scientists Eric Beerbohm and Ryan W. Davis consider how citizens can protect against gaslighting while staying open to audacious ideas of change.
Letters, diaries, and remembrances shared on JSTOR by University of the Pacific reveal the hardships of day-to-day life during the California Gold Rush.
Political scientist Javier Corrales uses Venezuela as a case-study of democratic backsliding that’s been initiated by the winner of an election, not the loser.
Doctors in skeptical Scotland had to persuade the courts to listen to them, in part because of the historical animosity between the professions of law and medicine.
Glenn McPherson, the bureaucrat largely responsible for selling off the property of interned Japanese Canadians during World War II, was also a secret agent.
