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.
Europeans used standardized bars of iron mined in northern Europe to purchase humans during the slave era, transforming the coastal landscape of West Africa.
Historian Sheila Fitzpatrick explores the limits of the Stalinist system through the biography of a marginal figure, one Anastasia Emelianovna Egorova.
Wertham convinced 1950s America that comic books led to depravity. He also used his extremist views to raise money for an anti-racist clinic in Harlem.
What are scientists to do? Psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton and historian of science Naomi Oreskes consider the social responsibility of climate scientists.
Offering advice for visiting Sarasota Springs and other sights, Gideon Davison combined the travel narrative and road book to create a new type of travel guide.
Lithium is increasingly seen as a strategic resource, especially for batteries in dreams of a green future. But where does it come from, and at what cost?
The defining of corporations as legal “persons” entitled to Fourteenth Amendment rights got a leg up from the fight over a California anti-Chinese immigrant law.
China had a long history of astronomy before the arrival of Europeans, but the politics of absolute rule led to the eventual embrace of Western methods.
Celebrated and damned as the “father of the atomic bomb,” theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer lived a complicated scientific and political life.
