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.
In the 1890s, self-proclaimed Zulu princes toured the United States, performing a con game on Americans eager to know Africa and Christianize its peoples.
The 1819 assassination of playwright August von Kotzebue by theology student Karl Sand is considered one of foundational moments in German nationalism.
The light management of forests in Normandy since WWII helped preserve the remains of German supply depots and other artifacts of war hidden in the woodlands.
Burke and Hare infamously killed people to meet the demand for bodies in Edinburgh’s anatomy schools in 1828. But who remembers the man for whom they worked?
“Anthropogenic,” meaning of human causes, is generally used to refer to climate change. But it also covers the powerful evolutionary force that is humanity.
After Einstein’s general theory of relativity was proven during a 1919 solar eclipse, quantum and nuclear physics pushed it aside to hog the limelight.
Earthworks built around 3,700 years ago in Louisiana centered an exchange system that stretched up the Mississippi and into the Ohio and Tennessee Valleys.
UCLA’s Violence Center was squelched by political revolt, not so much for its ambition to stockpile behavioral data as Americans' fear of psychosurgery.
On the same night as Chicago’s Great Fire of 1871, some 2,400 square miles of Wisconsin and Michigan burned in a firestorm that took more than 1,000 lives.
The 1952 McCarran-Walter Act allowed first-generation Japanese American immigrants to become US citizens while keeping African Caribbean immigrants out.
Wallace wouldn't have become a famous naturalist without help from colonial networks and hundreds of locals, including his indefatigable Sarawak servant, Ali.
