Matthew Wills

Sixteenth-century Venice conducted its affairs in code, so much so that cryptology was professionalized and regulated by the state.

The turn from punishing sexual activity outside of marriage toward the idea of personal sexual freedom began in the West between 1600 and 1800.

Marxist cultural critic Fredric Jameson offered a philosophy of late capitalism that gave us a language for talking about globalization and the end of modernism.

The idea of a Silk Road, though it conjures up visions of exotic goods passing between Asia and Europe via ancient trade routes, is a thoroughly modern one.

As the financial history of Maryland shows, slavery represented extraordinarily liquid wealth and outsized political power.

The slowly expanding protections of “climbing boys” reveal the changing attitudes to child labor in Ireland during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Arguing that they had been stripped of their citizenship and rights, hundreds of Nisei risked extending their imprisonment by resisting the draft.

In 1812, a burst of anti-Luddite panic law-making in Great Britain added to an already confusing series of statutes that addressed property crime.

Tarantula hawk wasps offer some of the most painful stings known to humans, giving them almost absolute protection from vertebrate predators.

One of the first American socialists to run for office, Wilshire was born rich and got richer before losing it all by self-publishing a socialist magazine.