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Black and white headshot of author Matthew Wills

Matthew Wills

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.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Benedictus_Spinoza._Line_engraving_by_W._Pobuda_after_(A._P._Wellcome_V0005578.jpg

Nice Guy Spinoza Finishes…First?

The Dutch Jewish philosopher Spinoza died in 1677, which is when the battle to define his life—and work—began.
Tiburcio Parrott

Birth of the Corporate Person

The defining of corporations as legal “persons” entitled to Fourteenth Amendment rights got a leg up from the fight over a California anti-Chinese immigrant law.
Flag of the Chinese Empire under the Qing dynasty (1889-1912)

Dragon Swallows the Sun: Predicting Eclipses in China

China had a long history of astronomy before the arrival of Europeans, but the politics of absolute rule led to the eventual embrace of Western methods.
Alvin, the Navy research submarine

A Cold War Baby: Happy Birthday, Alvin!

The submersible Alvin is sixty years old this year. Numerous overhauls and upgrades have kept the craft going down (and coming back up!).
J. Robert Oppenheimer

The Annotated Oppenheimer

Celebrated and damned as the “father of the atomic bomb,” theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer lived a complicated scientific and political life.
President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, 1964

Using False Claims to Justify War

Hardly the recent innovation it’s frequently mistakened to be, deception as a path to war has been used by American presidents since the 1800s.
Burt Lancaster in a scene from the film Birdman Of Alcatraz, 1962

Freeing Birdman of Alcatraz

Neither the Bureau of Prisons nor the Production Code Administration could stop the production of a movie about murderer and ornithologist Robert Stroud.
The Schultz House, c. 1889

A Flood of Tourism in Johnstown

Days after a failed dam led to the drowning deaths of more than 2,200 people, the Pennsylvania industrial town was flooded again—with tourists.
Portrait of James B. Parker

Two William McKinley Autopsies

The 1901 assassination of US President William McKinley at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo revealed the abysmal state of race relations in America.
Total solar eclipse, May 29, 1919, at Sobral, Brazil

Bridging The Gap of War: Einstein’s Eclipse

Astronomer Arthur S. Eddington argued that astronomy should be above politics, even when politics leads to world war.
News coverage of lynchings in Texas

Black Women Were Also Lynched

A case study of the 1912 lynching of Mary Jackson in Harrison County, Texas, provides insight into the contradictory culture of racial violence.
Anaxagoras

Anaxagoras and the Eclipse: The First to Get It Right

Scholars sometimes credit Thales or Empedocles of Acragas with the first correct theory of solar eclipses, but it was Anaxagoras who had the science right.
Immigrants View The Statue Of Liberty, 1887

Birth of A National Immigration Policy

Until the Civil War, regulating immigration to the US was left to individual states. That changed with Emancipation and the legal end of slavery.
Rationale of the Dirty Joke by G. Legman

G. Legman and the Bawdy Eclectic

A fierce opponent of censorship, Gershon Legman helped legitimize the academic study of erotic folklore as manifested in jokes, limericks, and songs.
Deteriorating nitrate motion picture film

Combustible Cinema? The Nitrate Film Issue

The early plastic called celluloid was made of nitrocellulose and camphor. It made for spectacular pictures. It also made for spectacular fires.
A 1906 Postcard from the National Electric Light Association's convention held at the boardwalk in Atlantic City New Jersey

Generating Electricity…and Uncertainty

As the tobacco and electrical industries demonstrate, US corporations have a history of sowing doubt for profit.
The Honeywell 316 Kitchen Computer

A Computer in Every Kitchen?

The 1969 Honeywell Kitchen Computer is a case study of early computer failures—or is it?
Convicts in Sydney, Australia, 1830

Colonial Masquerade: Convict, Pirate, Gentleman, Con

The convict ships that colonized Australia carried people desperate to get out of their sentence. At least, that was true of Michael Stewart.
Ambrotype of African American Woman with Flag - believed to be a washerwoman for Union troops quartered outside Richmond, Virginia

Home Front: Black Women Unionists in the Confederacy

The resistance and unionism of enslaved and freed Black women in the midst of the Confederacy is an epic story of sacrifice for nation and citizenship.
Four versions of Hokusai's Great Wave, from the Art Institute of Chicago, LACMA, Tokyo National Museum, and British Museum

Under Hokusai’s Great Wave

Hokusai’s watery woodblock print is such a common sight that most people tend to look past the peril at its center.
Carter G. Woodson

Museum Roots

The founders of Black American museums in the post-World War II era were all shaped by Carter G. Woodson’s “Negro Canon” of history and art.
An illustration of a sick horse in a barn, 1872

Civilization Without Horses: The Epizootic of 1872

We’re all now too familiar with the words “pandemic” and “epidemic,” but how about “epizootic”?
Performers go through their routine during a media call for the New Shanghai Circus Australian tour at the Lyric Theatre, Star City June 16, 2004 in Sydney, Australia.

Exporting Chinese Acrobats

Chinese acrobats have been impressing circus-goers at shows like Cirque du Soleil since the 1980s. How did these gymnastic marvels make their way to the West?
Workmen at Federal Telegraph smoothing two castings for 80-ton magnets.

Vacuum Tube Valley 

Silicon Valley’s first high-tech enterprise, Federal Telegraph Co., provided communications for naval ships and radio stations at far-flung US imperial bases.
Mao Tse-tung facing Nikita Khrushchev during the Russian leader's 1957 visit to Peking

A Messy Divorce: The Sino-Soviet Split

The ideological disagreements between two nations shattered the idea of monolithic communism and re-arranged the chessboard of the Cold War.