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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.

A climate change activist stands outside the home of Sen. Ben Sasse (R-NE) on June 30, 2022 in Washington, DC. Activist groups are holding a "Tour of Shame", or march to the homes of senators they consider most responsible for a reduction in climate change regulations.

A Return To Nineteenth-Century Style Regulation?

In an era of laissez-faire governance, a growing number of federal and state regulations were justified as necessary to protect public health and morality.
Male and female runners on a blue background

Gender Incommensurability In Sports

Cultural systems have historically defined sex segregation. The imperfect science has led to failures in policing gender in sports.
National Police Gazette

Policing Abortion

A study on the criminalization of abortion in the late 1800s through the 1940s reveals that the law was often used against working-class women.
Fetching water from a spigot which services many people who live in the huge slum area known as "El Fangitto" in San Juan, Puerto Rico

The New Deal Comes To Puerto Rico

Puerto Rico was hit hard by the Great Depression. New Deal relief programs were often democratic and locally controlled.
From Sexualpathologie by Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, 1921

Visualizing Trans Identities

Photography played an important role in determining gender categories and presentations for both scientists and trans individuals in interwar Germany.
Photograph: German strongman Eugene Sandow lifting weights and dumbbells, c. 1890

Buff Boys of America: Eugen Sandow and Jesus

Under the influence of Muscular Christianity, Jesus transformed into a muscle-bound Aryan, saving souls through strength and masculinity.
A butcher processes some meat at Vincents Meat Market on April 17, 2020, in Bronx, New York City

Zombies of the Slaughterhouse

The oppressions of Homo sapiens and other species in the US livestock industry aren’t distinct from one another—they’re mutually constitutive.
The New India Museum, Whitehall-Yard. Illustration for The Illustrated London News, 3 August 1861.

Imperial Science and the Company’s Museum

The East India Company’s London museum stored the stuff of empire, feeding the growth of new collections-based disciplines and scientific societies.
At La Souris, Madame Palmyre, 1949 by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

Palmyre’s Belle Époque Lesbian Bar

By providing sexualized entertainment to tourists, the bar owners of Montmartre made visible and even celebrated the quarter’s queer culture.
The New York American 1912 Headline for the sinking of the Titanic

Bodies of the Titanic: Found and Lost Again

Ideas about economic class informed decisions about which recovered bodies would be preserved for land burial and which would be returned to the icy seas.
Jeannace June Freeman

The Lesbian As Villain or Victim

In Oregon in the 1960s, the debate over capital punishment hinged on shifting interpretations of the gendered female body.
The January 1961 cover for Mad Magazine

Mad About Nixon

No other personality appeared more often on the cover of Mad during the first fifty years of the satirical magazine’s life.
Finland's President Sauli Niinisto (L) greets Sweden's Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson as they are welcomed to the White House by U.S. President Joe Biden on May 19, 2022 in Washington, DC.

Neutrality: Not All It’s Cracked Up To Be

While Sweden has claimed a position of neutrality for more than two centuries, its policy of non-alignment was somewhat ambiguous during the Cold War.
ADN-ZB / H‰fller 30.7.73 Together with Italian festival delegates, members of the National People's Army sing at Alexanderplatz, July 1973

The Red Woodstock: Not Quite According to Plan

The 1973 World Festival of Youth and Students highlighted the paradoxes inherent in the East German socialist project.
A couple holding hands

The Long History of Same-Sex Marriage

Same-sex marriages, in all possible configurations and with all possible motivations, have taken place throughout the history of the United States.
Rosa Bonheur in her atelier (1893) by Georges Achille-Fould

Rosa Bonheur’s Permission to Wear Pants

One of the few women permitted to wear trousers during the Third Republic, the French artist developed a sense of self through her clothing choices.
An Chang Ho, Kap Suk Cho and other workers at Riverside orange orchard

The First Koreatown

Pachappa Camp, the first Korean-organized immigrant settlement in the United States, was established through the efforts of Ahn Chang Ho.
An illustration of a bathysphere, 1934

The New Oceanography: More Remote and More Inclusive

The days of celebrity oceanographers romancing the deep are gone, and maybe that’s a good thing.
Two men of the French Foreign Legion, 1955

OK Recruiter: The Legion is Coming

Anxieties over the abduction of young men into the French Foreign Legion after WWII reflected West Germany’s concerns about the state of their nation.
Ornament for title page of The Columbian Magazine for the year 1789

Reading Aloud in the Early Republic

Magazines of the freshly founded United States drew legitimacy and stability from the collective voice and sociability of their editors.
Plate 66 of Birds of America by John James Audubon depicting Ivory-billed Woodpecker

Is the Ivory-billed Woodpecker Still Around?

With the US government poised to declare the Ivory-billed Woodpecker extinct, scientists work to determine what counts as evidence of existence.
Exhuming the remains of President Monroe in the Second Street Cemetery

Fighting Over the Dead

There was more than one violent altercation at the cemetery when one side of the family wanted to move a dead relative, and the other didn’t.
The First "Computer Bug" Moth found trapped between points at Relay # 70, Panel F, of the Mark II Aiken Relay Calculator at Harvard University, 9 September 1947.

The Bug in the Computer Bug Story

Soon after a team of engineers discovered a moth in a machine at Harvard, the word "bug" became a standard part of the programmer's lexicon. Or did it?
Ruins at end of Richmond and Petersburg Railroad Bridge, Richmond, between 1861 and 1865

Not Mathew Brady: The Civil War Photos of Andrew J. Russell

Will the real Civil War photographer please stand up?
News reporters mingle with members of the International Brigade, amongst them is Ernest Hemingway (with mustache and glasses), during the Spanish Civil War, c. 1937.

The International Brigades

Foreigners fighting for Ukraine may call to mind the International Brigades that fought in defense of the Spanish Republic during the Spanish Civil War.