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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 map of the world showing the extent of the British Empire in 1886

A Primer on Settler Colonialism

What is this “settler colonialism” that’s become all the rage? Let’s take a closer look.
Elisha Gray

Gray’s Music: Over the Telegraph

Inventor of the telephone Elisha Gray also pioneered the world’s first purpose-built electric musical instrument.
Pausanias sacrifices a lamb to Greek and Roman pagan gods before fighting in the battle of Plataea

Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: Animal Sacrifice and the Greek Gods

The ritual of animal sacrifice in ancient Greece brought humans closer to the gods even as it defined their differences.
Frame from the 1935 film Carnival of Colours

Putting the Red in Soviet Color Film

A Soviet alternative to Disney cartoon became a state ideal, but the three-color process behind Silly Symphony cartoons wasn’t easy to perfect.
Operation Morning Light team members, dressed in specially designed arctic clothing, begin the painstaking process of searching the area with hand-held radiation detectors.

The Trouble with Reentry

Reentry of space junk in the 1970s forced First Nations communities into a reckoning with Cold War geopolitics and a burgeoning envirotechnical disaster.
Gaslighting illustration concept with two hands with tangled string over someone's head

Audacity and Gaslights: Empowering or Zombifying Citizens?

Political scientists Eric Beerbohm and Ryan W. Davis consider how citizens can protect against gaslighting while staying open to audacious ideas of change.
View of Baltimore, Maryland, ca. 1873

Justice in Baltimore

In an atypical case, a white policeman was convicted of killing a Black man at a private house party.
Abstract illustration of faceless man in dark suit.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Authoritarianism

Is the global state system in crisis, with authoritarianism, nationalism, populism, and illiberalism running amok?
California gold miners, ca. 1850-1852

A Gold Rush of Witnesses

Letters, diaries, and remembrances shared on JSTOR by University of the Pacific reveal the hardships of day-to-day life during the California Gold Rush.
President Nicolas Maduro on August 2, 2024 at the Miraflores presidential palace in Caracas, Venezuela.

Democratic Backsliding

Political scientist Javier Corrales uses Venezuela as a case-study of democratic backsliding that’s been initiated by the winner of an election, not the loser.
Illustration of space junk orbiting the Earth.

Garbage on the Final Frontier

We’ve trashed Earth, so let’s trash space… Oh, wait, we already have!
Green Iguanas

The Reptilian Renaissance

Think reptiles like crocodiles and caimans are slow learners? It’s probably because you’re human.
A unicorn, a squirrel and a mouse. Cut-out engravings pasted onto paper

The Undying Unicorn

What role could a mythical animal play in our lives—centuries after its existence came into question?
Court in session, Freedmen's Bureau offices, Richmond, Virginia, summer 1866

A Short Course in Justice: the Freedmen’s Bureau Courts

Freedmen’s Bureau courts provided a forum for newly emancipated people in the “uncertain legal landscape” of the defeated Confederacy.
Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cabildo_Supreme_Court,_New_Orleans,_La_(NYPL_b12647398-62248).tiff

Eulalie Mandeville’s Fortune in Court Records

Court records can function as a kind of archive for those without any other paper trail in history: free people of color and the enslaved.
Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Visit_to_Dred_Scott_-_his_family_-_incidents_of_his_life_-_decision_of_the_Supreme_Court_LCCN2002707034.tif?page=1

The US Army as a Slaveholding Institution

Until the Civil War, US Army officers relied on enslaved servants even while serving in “free states.”
Gunsmith and ballistics expert Robert Churchill using a microscope to help compile a ballistic report for Scotland Yard in the case of the murder of Essex police officer PC George Gutteridge, 1927

Performing Forensics: Doctors Becoming Expert Witnesses

Doctors in skeptical Scotland had to persuade the courts to listen to them, in part because of the historical animosity between the professions of law and medicine.
Government official meeting Hide Hyodo Shimizu's class at New Denver Internment Camp school, New Denver, British Columbia

Disinheritance: The Internment of Japanese Canadians

Glenn McPherson, the bureaucrat largely responsible for selling off the property of interned Japanese Canadians during World War II, was also a secret agent.
El Aquelarre by Francisco Goya

Accused as a Witch? Sue ’em!

That’s what they did in the Kingdom of Navarre, where some of the victims brought suit against their accusers for defamation and other offenses.
Currency with nature prints of leaves from 1775 and 1778

The First Green Money: Nature-Printed Currency

Benjamin Franklin used naturalist Joseph Breintnall’s botanic prints of leaves on his paper currency to foil counterfeiters.
Piece of Roquefort cheese, made from sheep milk in the caves of Roquefort-sur-Soulzon

Cheesy Terroir-ism: The ABCs of AOCs

Whether it supports the production of wine or cheese, terroir is a “particularly French conception of cultural territory” says historian Tamara L. Whited.
Artwork from an XBox 360 Minecraft game cover, 2014

Neocolonial Minecraft

One of the world’s best-selling video games, Minecraft conceals problematic assumptions about coloniality and power, argues educator Bennett Brazelton.
Modern machinery is used in salvaging the Abu Simbel Temple as part of the Aswan Dam Project.

An Epic Face-Lift: Moving Abu Simbel Out of the Nile

Some 25,000 workers cut Abu Simbel’s statues and temples into pieces, hoisted them into the air, and reassembled them on an artificial hill 200 meters away.
A postcard depicting the first hoeing of cotton

Hoe History: Complex and Knotted

The plantation hoe, a simple, ubiquitous, and historically ignored farming tool, was specific to the Atlantic colonial project, shows historian Chris Evans.
A map of North America

The Making and Meaning of Greenland: A Reading List

A selection of research reports and peer-reviewed articles offers insight into the history and potential future of the autonomous territory of Greenland.