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.
Cesare Lombroso wanted to use science to understand who criminals were. But his ideas about biological "atavism" easily transferred to eugenics and nativism.
Two educators use the history of corn, from the domestication of maize 10,000 years ago to today's ubiquitous "commodity corn," to teach about biodiversity.
A law of 1790 said that only "free white persons" were eligible to be naturalized. But courts struggled for years afterward to tell who was white at all.
Women's clubs were popular after the Civil War among white and Black women. But white clubwomen used their influence to ingrain racist curriculum in schools.
Isinglass comes from the swim bladders of certain kinds of fish and can be found in everything from beer recipes to illuminated manuscripts. Ew? No way.
In 1968, the Kerner Commission “explicitly identified white racism as the principal cause of the civil disorder evidenced across hundreds of U.S. cities."
