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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 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.
The Strand, London, with St Mary's Church, and Somerset House, 1753

What Was It like to Be an Inuit in London in 1772?

London had long been described as wearying and unreadable, so it's not surprising that Inuit visitors considered it unfathomable and irrational as well.
Bob Gutowski, 1957

Pole Vaulting Over the Iron Curtain

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.
Community Service Organization (CSO) Voter registration drive, 1958

Money and Activism: Mixed Messages

During the Cold War, philanthropic paternalism put Mexican American grassroots activists in the American Southwest at odds with East Coast funding institutions.
Jack Parsons

Sex-Cult Rocket Man

Jack Parsons, one of the “suicide squad” trio of young rocket-boy founders of Jet Propulsion Laboratory, had an improbable extracurricular life.
The Execution of Charles I of England, c. 1649

It’s Not as Good to Be the King as It Used to Be

The trial and execution of Charles I irrevocably sundered the tradition of a divine, anointed king.
The Virginia opossum

The Strange Career of the Lady Possum of the New World

Marsupials make people think of Australia, but Europeans encountered and described their first marsupial, the Virginia opossum, in 1499.
An olive grove infested with Xylella fastidiosa in Apulia, Italy.

The A-to-X of Olive Quick Decline Syndrome

The syndrome, caused by the bacterium Xyllella fastidiosa, was first detected in southern Italy in 2013. Can ancient olive orchards survive its effects?
Albert Einstein, 1921

In Search of Einstein’s Brain

After Albert Einstein’s death in 1955, a pathologist—searching for the secret of genius—removed, dissected, and ultimately stole the mathematician’s brain.
Baby Drew, 1913

Boys in Dresses: The Tradition

It’s difficult to read the gender of children in many old photos. That’s because coding American children via clothing didn’t begin until the 1920s.
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.