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.
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.
The story of J. Edgar Hoover dressing in women's clothing is part of American myth. But does this story tell us more about Hoover or about the nature of gossip?
A miniseries directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder finally has its U.S. premier 45 years later and reminds us of the phenomenon of this great German director.
German imperialists teamed up with Irish republicans and Indian nationalists during World War I; the resulting conspiracy trial ended in a courtroom assassination.
Marooned sailor Alexander Selkirk, rescued after four years on a remote island, is usually taken as the model of Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, but is he really?
Michelangelo, perhaps the greatest artist the world has produced, wasn't a child prodigy like Mozart. He learned on the job. So maybe there's still hope for the rest of us.
The writings of Martin Luther King, not so well known as his speeches and acts of civil disobedience, are a rich source for those researching his life.
The late summer crime wave of 1744 London sparked an intense moral panic about crime that burnt itself out by the new year. But not before heads rolled.
Women's suffrage was usually portrayed negatively in early films, but suffragists well recognized the importance of movies in getting their message out.
