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.
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.
With statehood in 1959 came “Aloha Spirit” tourism, turning Hawai‘i’s ethnic diversity into a commodity that benefited both business and US foreign policy.
Jewish immigrants and British authorities tried to sell electrification as a matter of business while Palestinian Arabs viewed it as a Zionist nation-building project.
The US Sanitary Commission is credited with saving lives during the Civil War, but its leadership hoped it would be remembered for advancing racialized science.
For the Americans, narratives about the savagery of the British became an important part of nation-building and a moral justification for armed rebellion.
In the nineteenth century, the Euro-American “Lost Tribes of Israel” theory was one of the most popular explanations for the existence of Indigenous peoples.
British policing of Communism before and into the Cold War has often been compared favorably with America’s witch-hunt hysteria. But was it really better?
