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 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?
False rumors of an alleged Wampanoag uprising on Nantucket Island in 1738 were turned into a story of an Indian rebellion thwarted via a Boston newspaper.
The idea of barbarian invasions comes from the nineteenth century, when they were constructed as the decisive event that wrenched the West into modernity.
In the 1960s, the Mattachine Society had only a few thousand members. But tens of thousands of men subscribed to physique magazines published by gay entrepreneurs.
There were British African Caribbean immigrants to the UK well before June 22, 1948, but it was the arrival of Empire Windrush that got the media's attention.
The war radicalized many draft-age men, gay as well as straight. They helped normalize certain expressions of homosexuality while trying to avoid the draft.
John Burroughs, supported by Theodore Roosevelt, castigated popular nature writers for being too sentimental. They responded by calling Roosevelt a sham naturalist.
Land snails, mostly hermaphroditic, follow slime trails to find their mates. Others, including predatory Rosy Wolf Snails, follow the mucus to find their meals.
