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.
The slowly expanding protections of “climbing boys” reveal the changing attitudes to child labor in Ireland during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
The idea of a Silk Road, though it conjures up visions of exotic goods passing between Asia and Europe via ancient trade routes, is a thoroughly modern one.
Reeling from defeat in Vietnam, the US invaded a Cambodian island to rescue a US freighter—just before its crew members, who were elsewhere, were released.
Marxist cultural critic Fredric Jameson offered a philosophy of late capitalism that gave us a language for talking about globalization and the end of modernism.
The transnational mobility of lifestyle migrants and digital nomads has led to the globalization of rent gaps and the pricing out of locals in some cities.
Poverty, disparities in wealth, widespread brigandage, and the dissolution of the feudal system enabled the predatory practices of Sicily’s citrus mafia.
During the Great Depression, financial elites translated European fascism into an American form that joined high capital with lower middle-class populism.
With roots in the motions and biases of vaudeville, burlesque, mesmerism, and minstrelsy, “air playing” with imaginary instruments long predates rock music.
Because of its political structure, Washington became a test case in federally mandated laws that enabled racially discriminatory policing of public space.
The presence of female fighters gives legitimacy to armed rebellions and increases the chances of support from international NGOS and other external actors.
Imperialism, experienced as both royal subject and new colonizer, has been a key element in the development, continuity, and disruption of American humor.
