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Black and white headshot of author Matthew Wills

Matthew Wills

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.

Annie Grayson; Or, Life in Washington

Nancy Lasselle’s Washington Novels

Lasselle’s 1850s novels were the first to examine the entanglements of society and politics—including lobbying—in Washington, DC.
Women cooking in a public kitchen, 19th century

Kitchenless Dreams

Escaping the drudgery of housekeeping via collective action became a feminist focus of utopian practitioners and theorists in the later nineteenth century.
Photograph of a man standing on a path among trees one and one-half years old growing next to an irrigation canal and headgate in Imperial Valley. He is wearing a white hat.

The Irrigationist

Canadian-born George Chaffey was instrumental in bringing irrigation and the consequent development of the “agriburb” to California…and Australia…and Israel.
Washington Market, New York, 1872

Feeding a City the Municipal Way

Between 1790 and 1860, New York City’s food markets were public, sustained by active government involvement. What happened?
Cougar Silhouette

Ghost Cats of the East

Why do people claim to see cougars in the eastern United States when the cats are now extremely rare in that part of North America?
The President and Mrs. Kennedy attend a dinner May 11, 1962 in honor of Minister of State for Cultural Affairs of France, Andre Malroux, left.

Jackie’s French Connection

Jacqueline Kennedy, with her French ancestry and command of the language, was a not-so-secret American weapon in US-France relations in the early 1960s.
Ezra Stiles, 1770

Yale’s Lost Indian Museum

The (now lost) collection of Native American artifacts at Yale College reveals the mechanics and high cost of the settler-colonialist nation-building project.
The tennis shoes of William and Ernest Renshaw, 1880

The Dawn of Kicks

Invented for a faddish game in the 1880s, tennis shoes became fashionable when manufacturers, fearing the tennis boom would go bust, pushed them off the lawn.
A Black soldier of the 12th Armored Division stands guard over a group of Nazi prisoners captured in the surrounding German forest, April 1945

Prisoners Like Us: German POW and Black American Solidarity

During World War II, almost a half million POWs were interned in the United States, where they forged sympathetic relationships with Black American soldiers.
Tommie Smith, John Carlos and other members of US team give the Black power salute at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics

Black Power on British TV

International television coverage of the American Civil Rights struggle was critical in the construction of racial identity and experience in postwar Britain.
Six young men riding on a horse-drawn wagon filled with corn at the Manual Training and Industrial School for Colored Youth in Bordentown, NJ, 1935

Even the Best Jim Crow School…Was Still a Jim Crow School

Before Brown v. Board of Education, Black activists split between integrationist and separatist factions, particularly at New Jersey’s Bordentown School.
1866 Johnson Map of Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland and Delaware

Emancipation Comes to West Virginia

The Emancipation Proclamation exempted border states from the demand to free enslaved people. But what about West Virginia, which wasn’t yet a state?
1969: American athlete Reggie Jackson of the Oakland Athletics, swinging a bat while in uniform, on the field of an empty baseball stadium.

Reggie Jackson Superstar

Clutch hitter Reggie Jackson dominated baseball in the 1970s as a “Me Decade” athlete who became one of the first sports super-celebrities.
Police officers patrolling the streets at the start of the Birmingham Campaign in Birmingham, Alabama, May 1963.

The Police Dog As Weapon of Racial Terror

Police K-9 units in the United States emerged during the Civil Rights era. This was not a coincidence.
Doris Miller just after being presented with the Navy Cross by Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, on board USS Enterprise at Pearl Harbor, May 27, 1942.

Remembering Doris Miller

Following his actions at Pearl Harbor, Messman Doris Miller was the first Black sailor to be honored with the Navy Cross—but only after political pressure.
From a 1964 stamp from Tanzania

Tanzania in the Cold War Crucible

After the US-Belgian assassination of the Congo’s first Prime Minister, leaders in Tanganyika and Zanzibar worried they would be given the same treatment.
Statue of Ostap Bender, Elista, Russia

The Red Sting: Conmen in the USSR

The Soviets loved a good confidence game, as was made evident by the popularity of the fictional character of Ostap Bender after Russian Revolution.
From The Tertiary insects of North America, 1890

Historical Bugs: Archaeoentomology

The remains of ancient insects reveal new information about Paleo-Eskimo life and the history of the Norse in Greenland, Iceland, and the Faroe Islands.
Adam Smith

Adam Smith, Revolutionary?

By 1800, Smith—once considered a friend of the poor and an enemy of the privileges of the rich—was already being refashioned into a icon of conservatism.
seaweed on a spoon

Eating Seaweed in the Americas

From the kelp highway to blue plate kelp specials, seaweeds are gaining greater acceptance on the dining tables in the Americas.
From a poster by Henry Van de Velde for a food supplement, 1898

Art Nouveau: Art of Darkness

First named such in Belgium, Art Nouveau was intimately tied up with that country’s brutal rule of the Congo.
From the cover of the NYRB edition of Arabesques

Arabic Hebrew, Hebrew Arabic: The Work of Anton Shammas

Within the alienated and antagonist cultures inside Israel’s borders, Arabic and Hebrew—related, but mutually unintelligible languages—cross-fertilize each other.
Idealized Portrait of a Woman (allegedly Simonetta Vespucci) by Sandro Botticelli

The Renaissance Lets Its Hair Down

The notion that everybody was going to be hairless in Heaven may not have sat well with Italian Renaissance painter Sandro Botticelli.
Edward John Eyre

When Intellectuals Split: The Eyre Case

Public intellectuals in Great Britain disagreed on what to do with Governor Eyre after his heavy-handed response to the 1865 Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica.
Sandy Hook Lighthouse

To the Lighthouses: A Path to Nationhood

Instilling confidence among merchants and ship captains was an area in which most agreed the new federal authority could and should act.