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.
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.
Following his actions at Pearl Harbor, Messman Doris Miller was the first Black sailor to be honored with the Navy Cross—but only after political pressure.
After the US-Belgian assassination of the Congo’s first Prime Minister, leaders in Tanganyika and Zanzibar worried they would be given the same treatment.
The remains of ancient insects reveal new information about Paleo-Eskimo life and the history of the Norse in Greenland, Iceland, and the Faroe Islands.
By 1800, Smith—once considered a friend of the poor and an enemy of the privileges of the rich—was already being refashioned into a icon of conservatism.
Within the alienated and antagonist cultures inside Israel’s borders, Arabic and Hebrew—related, but mutually unintelligible languages—cross-fertilize each other.
Public intellectuals in Great Britain disagreed on what to do with Governor Eyre after his heavy-handed response to the 1865 Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica.
