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.
A man named Samuel Clemens received funds from the radical abolitionist Boston Vigilance Committee in 1854. It may have been Mark Twain, pulling a prank.
Every statue tells a story, often long forgotten. San Francisco's Pioneer Mother Monument in Golden Gate Park was greeted with disappointed by the woman who originated it.
May of 1568 was a fateful month for Mary, Queen of Scots. She managed to escape prison, but only to be being defeated in battle soon after. Then she made the fateful decision to run to England.
The great turn towards privatization is usually thought to have begun in the 1970s, with Chile's dictatorial regime, but its roots go back further than this.
There were boycotts before the word was coined in the 1880s, but ever since then they've always been called after the experience of Captain Charles Boycott.
The first compound microscopes date to 1590, but it was the Dutch Antony Van Leeuwenhoek in the mid-seventeenth century who first used them to make discoveries.
Following the introduction of the mop top by the Beatles, the battle over how long school boys could wear their hair in the 1960s and 1970s went to the courts again and again.
Beatrix Potter's biography covers a lot more than just cute bunnies getting into trouble in mean old Mr. McGregor's farm. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
Horses were omnipresent in the West until only a few generations ago, but then they were replaced by machines and disappeared from our streets as well as our consciousness.
Russian serfdom and American slavery ended within two years of each other; the defenders of these systems of bondage surprisingly shared many of the same arguments.
The day-long Purim festival was transformed into a week-long carnival in the Dutch Caribbean colonies, as a rowdy celebration of inversion celebrated liberations of all kinds.
The nation's first civil rights monument is a mural portraying the interracial audience at Marion Anderson's famed Freedom Concert of 1939 on the Washington Mall.
It's been 55 years since the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. The massive amounts of fallout in the decade previous to the Treaty taught us a lot about the interconnected planet we live on.
Initially, Indian slavery was considered different from African slavery in the early Anglo-American colonial world, but this split didn't last for long.
