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.
They're red, tart, and mostly eaten at Thanksgiving. Love them or hate them, here are seven things you might not have known about the humble cranberry.
When it began as Fox-Movietone News, the company was known for appealing to viewer's tastes by leaving out upsetting news, including the rise of fascism.
Józef Czapski was a painter, writer, and Proust scholar -- as well as one of the few Polish military officers not executed by the Soviet Union in 1940.
From WWI to the 1950s, the "American Plan" rounded up sexually-active women and quarantined them, supposedly to protect soldiers from venereal disease.
The controversial politician William Gannaway Brownlow shepherded Tennessee's re-admission to the Union. It was the first state of the Confederacy to do so.
Maria Theresa, the King of Hungary, ruled over the "accidental" Austro-Hungarian Empire, overseeing social, administrative, fiscal, and religious reforms.
The 1968 DNC was overshadowed by anti-war demonstrations. The Walker Report describing the events became controversial for the obscenities it contained.
