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.
Silicon Valley’s first high-tech enterprise, Federal Telegraph Co., provided communications for naval ships and radio stations at far-flung US imperial bases.
The $15 million price tag of the Louisiana Territory has been described as one of the greatest real estate bargains ever. But what did that actually buy?
When medical professionals joined anti-vice campaigners to censor publications about sex in the 1800s, they found themselves wielding a double-edged sword.
Once the Roman Empire crashed, so too did metal production in Britain. Luckily, scavenged metal could be reforged or used as is (because they needed spoons).
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.
