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 term “peer review” was coined in the 1970s, but the referee principle is usually assumed to be as old as the scientific enterprise itself. (It isn’t.)
The addition of footnotes to texts by historians began long before their supposed inventor, Leopold von Ranke, started using them (poorly, as it turns out).
When George III issued a proclamation forbidding settlement west of a line running through the Appalachian Mountains, colonists decided they’d had enough.
In a world of globalized trade, an industry of piratical lawyers has arisen to help transnational corporations seize the assets of supposedly sovereign states.
By law, all communications seen and/or touched by a United States president are supposed to be preserved. Reality—and executive privilege—is a lot messier.
Nearly 2 million biological samples from people affected by radiation from World War II nuclear bombings are stored in facilities in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Alexandre Lenoir’s Musée des monuments français, founded to protect French artifacts from the revolutionary mobs, was one of the first popular museums of Europe.
Thousands of Palestinian Arabs volunteered to fight against Germany and Italy during World War II, serving alongside Jewish volunteers from Mandate Palestine.
Europeans used standardized bars of iron mined in northern Europe to purchase humans during the slave era, transforming the coastal landscape of West Africa.
Historian Sheila Fitzpatrick explores the limits of the Stalinist system through the biography of a marginal figure, one Anastasia Emelianovna Egorova.
Wertham convinced 1950s America that comic books led to depravity. He also used his extremist views to raise money for an anti-racist clinic in Harlem.
What are scientists to do? Psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton and historian of science Naomi Oreskes consider the social responsibility of climate scientists.
Offering advice for visiting Sarasota Springs and other sights, Gideon Davison combined the travel narrative and road book to create a new type of travel guide.
