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.
Wartime production led directly to environmental and social injustices, polluting land and bodies in ways that continue to shape public policy and race relations.
Legend has it that the campaign to save abused children in New York was driven by the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. The truth is more complicated.
The electric chair was promoted as civilized and at the same time imbued with the technological sublime, the mystery of electrical power harnessed by humans.
The Pan-American Highway began a century ago with a vision of unfettered motor-vehicle access between Alaska and Tierra del Fuego. What happened to the dream?
Psychical researcher Harry Price combined the power of academic language with a cultural identity crisis to build a reputation as a “scientific” ghost-hunter.
The White Citizens’ Councils used the transportation of Black Americans to Northern states as a way to embarrass liberal critics and rally segregationists.
Drug use during World War II, especially by Nazis, was typically viewed as immoral. But what about when it was approved by leaders of the Royal Air Force?
Cosmic trees, found around the globe and throughout history, may represent a primeval fount of creation or a vegetal axis mundi that connects life and death.
The men and women who tracked down looted art after WWII didn’t just go after stuff stolen by the Nazis. They also searched for treasures stolen by the Japanese. Sort of.
“Colorblindness,” an ideology that denies that race is an organizing principle of the nation’s structural order, reaches back to the drafting of the US Constitution.
