Matthew Wills

3 days ago | daily.jstor.org | Matthew Wills

The icon indicates free access to the linked research on JSTOR. In a reformist push to reduce the widespread use of the death penalty in the new Commonwealth of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson drafted “A Bill for Proportioning Crimes and Punishments in Cases Heretofore Capital” in 1779. This was Bill 64 of 126 bills put together by Jefferson and the Committee of Revisors to rationalize law after the colonial period.

5 days ago | daily.jstor.org | Matthew Wills

The icon indicates free access to the linked research on JSTOR. In February 1960, France became the fourth nation after the United States, the USSR, and the United Kingdom to become a nuclear power. They did this by detonating a 70- kiloton atomic bomb at Reggane in the Sahara Desert.

1 week ago | daily.jstor.org | Matthew Wills

The icon indicates free access to the linked research on JSTOR. The idea was that once it started opening its economy to capitalism, China would inevitably become more democratic politically. A liberalized economy equals a liberalized state, or a free market leads to a free people, is how cheerleaders in the West sold it.

2 weeks ago | daily.jstor.org | Matthew Wills

The icon indicates free access to the linked research on JSTOR. “Settler colonialism” is one of those buzzy phrases that seemed to suddenly appear and then spread in the last dozen years, breaking out of specialized fields like Indigenous Studies into a wider context and audience.So. where does the phrase come from, and what does it mean?

2 weeks ago | daily.jstor.org | Matthew Wills

The icon indicates free access to the linked research on JSTOR. Alexander Graham Bell gets all the credit for inventing the telephone, but that’s because he triumphed in the legal arena all the way to the Supreme Court in 1888. The simple stories of great inventors obscure the fact that technological innovations often have many parents.