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.
Soon after a team of engineers discovered a moth in a machine at Harvard, the word "bug" became a standard part of the programmer's lexicon. Or did it?
Foreigners fighting for Ukraine may call to mind the International Brigades that fought in defense of the Spanish Republic during the Spanish Civil War.
The participation of white mothers in the "bitter robbery" of Indigenous children from their families was a cruel irony in the colonialist programs of the US and Australia.
In fascist Italy, childbirth, breastfeeding and motherhood were given a hybrid structure of industrial management and eugenicist biological essentialism.
Dueling was a dangerous, ritualized response to a real (or perceived) slight. It may also have been a means of proving one's social and economic capital.
As women became the focus of advertising, newspapers began to broaden their offerings targeted to those areas of interest traditionally associated with them.
American oilman Lyman Stewart embodied the uniquely American paradoxes of what would become capitalist Christian fundamentalism and the prosperity gospel.
Returning large, wild herbivores to Europe could help maintain soil health and discourage invasive species, but these cows have some political baggage...
Current attempts to correct historical discrimination by local and regional offices of the USDA have been met with charges of "reverse discrimination."
Sammy Davis Jr.'s conversion to Judaism in 1960 was met with skepticism, derision, and, yes, jokes by the members of the groups he claimed and embraced.
The use of a laugh track began with radio, and was taken up by the new medium of television in 1950. Both viewers and critics have loathed it ever since.
The atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the U.S. came with censorship and obfuscation about the effects of the radiation on those who were exposed.
The early US fight against smallpox was helped by the establishment of the National Vaccine Institute, an agency that wouldn't survive government mistrust.
