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.
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.
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.
