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.
Before the New World, Europeans arrived in the Canary Islands and set the model for the enslavements, genocides, and radical ecological transformations to come.
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.
London had long been described as wearying and unreadable, so it's not surprising that Inuit visitors considered it unfathomable and irrational as well.
When it became clear that the United States and its allies couldn’t “liberate” Eastern Europe through psychological war and covert ops, they turned to sports.
During the Cold War, philanthropic paternalism put Mexican American grassroots activists in the American Southwest at odds with East Coast funding institutions.
The syndrome, caused by the bacterium Xyllella fastidiosa, was first detected in southern Italy in 2013. Can ancient olive orchards survive its effects?
After Albert Einstein’s death in 1955, a pathologist—searching for the secret of genius—removed, dissected, and ultimately stole the mathematician’s brain.
Escaping the drudgery of housekeeping via collective action became a feminist focus of utopian practitioners and theorists in the later nineteenth century.
Canadian-born George Chaffey was instrumental in bringing irrigation and the consequent development of the “agriburb” to California…and Australia…and Israel.
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.
The (now lost) collection of Native American artifacts at Yale College reveals the mechanics and high cost of the settler-colonialist nation-building project.
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.
During World War II, almost a half million POWs were interned in the United States, where they forged sympathetic relationships with Black American soldiers.
International television coverage of the American Civil Rights struggle was critical in the construction of racial identity and experience in postwar Britain.
Before Brown v. Board of Education, Black activists split between integrationist and separatist factions, particularly at New Jersey’s Bordentown School.
