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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.

The Kim Sisters with Dean Martin

Ladies and Gentlemen, It’s The Kim Sisters

The diversification of talent on American variety shows obscured the reality of race relations in the United States during the Cold War.
Mary and Carl Bach

The Gruesome History of Ohio’s “Fingers in the Jar”

Three of Mary Bach’s fingers, hacked off by her murderous husband in 1881, were displayed in a jar for more than a century in Bowling Green, Ohio.
Five diagrams of the surface of the moon, during its phases. Aquatint after Galileo Galilei

1610: Dawn of the Extraterrestrial

Galileo's telescopic view of the Moon sparked a giant transformation in the way human beings thought about the natural world.
Burial mound in Moundsville, West Virginia

Native Origin Stories As Tools of Conquest

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.
A typical long-horn Texas Steer

Longhorns Long Gone (And Returned)

The end of the era of so-called Texas Longhorns doesn’t seem to have been sentimentalized at the time. Why do we wax nostalgic about it now?
Cadets of the 3rd Regiment approach their objective as a simulated mortar shell explodes in the distance in Training Area 9 during Army ROTC Cadet Summer Training on July 1, 2021 in Fort Knox, Kentucky

From Weapons to Wildlife?

While war is an environmental as well as human disaster, readiness and preparation for armed conflict is more ambiguous ecologically.
Julian Hawthorne and Margaret Fuller

A Literary Hit Job: Julian Hawthorne Takes Down Margaret Fuller

Fuller’s works, and works about her, sold very well until Hawthorne cast her as a “fallen woman” in his biography of his parents.
Black and white photograph of a man being arrested by the police.

Policing Radicals: Britain vs. the United States

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?
Family Portrait by Ralph Eleaser Whiteside Earl

The Nashville Museum of Natural and Artificial Curiosities

Inspired by Peale’s Philadelphia Museum, artist and collector Ralph E. W. Earl founded a similar institution in Tennessee in 1818.
A drawing of three chairs by Thomas Chippendale

The Shakespeare of English Furniture?

Not much is known about eighteenth-century furniture designer Thomas Chippendale, making his life and work perfect for mythologizing after his death.
An illustration from Arabian Nights, 1907

We Dream of Genie

In antebellum America, the voyages and adventures of Sinbad and Aladdin in the Arabian Nights nourished a young nation's dreams.

Inventing an American Indian Rebellion

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.
Illustration of The Vandals under leadership of Gaiseric (King of the Vandals) attacking Rome in 455 AD

De-Bunking the Barbarians

The idea of barbarian invasions comes from the nineteenth century, when they were constructed as the decisive event that wrenched the West into modernity.
The cover of the March, 1963 issue of Tomorrow's Man

Gay Mass Consumption Before Stonewall

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.
Martian Moon Deimos

Deimos: A Chip Off the Old Martian Block?

A new space probe suggests that the moonlet Deimos isn’t a captured asteroid after all.
A general view of the National Windrush Monument at Waterloo Station on June 22, 2022 in London, England.

Windrush Day

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 Northwestern University Gay Liberation Group attending the anti-Vietnam War demonstration in Washington, D.C.

Coming Out Against The Vietnam War

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.
Ricardo Flores Magón (left) and his brother Enrique in the Los Angeles County Jail, 1917.

Family and Revolution in the Borderlands

Paula Carmona, the founding mother of the magonista movement, was all but erased from Mexico’s revolutionary history.
A barbed wire fence runs along a beach near the Korean Demilitarized Zone, on February 3, 2018 near Goseong-gun, South Korea.

The Accidental Nature Preserve of the DMZ

The 1952 Korean War armistice set up a demilitarized zone between North Korea and South, inadvertently creating a critical nature sanctuary.
Mallards

Nature Fakers and Real Naturalists

John Burroughs, supported by Theodore Roosevelt, castigated popular nature writers for being too sentimental. They responded by calling Roosevelt a sham naturalist.
Euglandina rosea

A Slimy Story: Snail Mucus

Land snails, mostly hermaphroditic, follow slime trails to find their mates. Others, including predatory Rosy Wolf Snails, follow the mucus to find their meals.
The interior of the crater of Pico de Teide, Tenerife

The Canary Islands: First Stop of Imperialism

Before the New World, Europeans arrived in the Canary Islands and set the model for the enslavements, genocides, and radical ecological transformations to come.
Map illustrating legal erasure of roads in Fort Reno Park in 1943, following the clearance of Reno, a neighborhood.

Segregation by Eminent Domain

The Fifth Amendment allows the government to buy private property for the public good. That public good was long considered the expansion of white neighborhoods.
From the cover of The Black Mask magazine, June 1, 1923

The Gumshoes Who Took On the Klan

In the pages of Black Mask magazine, the Continental Op and Race Williams fought the KKK even as they shared its love of vigilante justice.
Marie Stopes in her laboratory, 1904

Counting Orgasms With Marie Stopes

Before gall wasp expert Alfred Kinsey turned to the study of human sexuality, another biologist made her move.