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 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.
Neither the Bureau of Prisons nor the Production Code Administration could stop the production of a movie about murderer and ornithologist Robert Stroud.
The 1901 assassination of US President William McKinley at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo revealed the abysmal state of race relations in America.
Scholars sometimes credit Thales or Empedocles of Acragas with the first correct theory of solar eclipses, but it was Anaxagoras who had the science right.
The resistance and unionism of enslaved and freed Black women in the midst of the Confederacy is an epic story of sacrifice for nation and citizenship.
Chinese acrobats have been impressing circus-goers at shows like Cirque du Soleil since the 1980s. How did these gymnastic marvels make their way to the West?
