Matthew Wills

How come it's so hard to go in sweet privacy when you're out and about?

From the colonial period to the end of the US Civil War, the rattlesnake sssssssymbolized everything from evil to unity and power.

As Progressive Era reforms increased the power of government, organized opposition to vaccination campaigns took on a new life.

A bottle of bitters from about 1918 had significant amounts of alcohol and lead—and not a trace of the supposed active ingredient.

Who made sure Henry David Thoreau's works came out after his death? His sister.

Hollywood was just fine avoiding all portrayals of the Central Intelligence Agency for years after the agency's founding in 1947.

She was one half of a powerhouse academic couple and an influential historian in her own right. But she's still often overlooked.

Uniting for better wages and working conditions, a remarkably diverse coalition of laborers faced off against agribusiness.

Leon Uris's bestselling book "Exodus" portrayed the founding of the state of Israel in terms many Americans could relate to.

South Dakota has been called "the Mississippi of the North" for its long history of making voting hard for Native Americans.

Women's clubs were popular after the Civil War among white and Black women. But white clubwomen used their influence to ingrain racist curriculum in schools.

The charivari (or shivaree) was a ritual in which people on the lower rungs of a community called out neighbors who violated social and sexual norms.

How the dental history of the nation’s first president is interwoven with slavery and privilege.

The African American Patriot, who died in the Boston Massacre, was erased from visual history. Black abolitionists revived his memory.

The Oneida Community's Christian form of collectivism was transported to California in the 1880s, when the original Oneida Community fell apart.

The founder of cultural anthropology, Franz Boas challenged the reigning notions of race and culture.

The Comte de Buffon's thirty-six volume Natural History claimed that America was a land of degeneracy. That enraged Thomas Jefferson.

In 1950, the U.S. State Department fired 91 employees because they were homosexual or suspected of being homosexual.

From colonial times to the nineteenth century, Thanksgiving was very different from the holiday we know now.

Are whistleblowers heroes or traitors? It depends who you ask.

On September 1st, 1858, a mob stormed the New York Marine Hospital in Staten Island, and set fire to the building.

Submarines played a major role in WW I. But the first submersible was actually used, unsuccessfully, in the Revolutionary War.

In 1919, a brutal outburst of mob violence was directed against African Americans across the United States. White, uniformed servicemen led the charge.

Remembering the Russian cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space, and how she challenged American stereotypes.