• In the nineteenth century, green dresses colored with arsenic poisoned well-dressed women in European cities: “As late as 1871, a ‘lady who purchased a box of green-colored gloves at a well-known and respectable house’ suffered from repeated skin ulcerations around her fingernails until arsenical salts were detected.” (Pictorial)

• A deep dive into the records of New York’s Emigrant Savings Bank allows for a close reading of the finances and business lives of German and Irish immigrants. (NYPL)

• Forgotten bestsellers of the nineteenth century, and the women who wrote them: “‘In the mid-nineteenth century, Tiffany Aldrich MacBain adds, ‘sentimental literature was very popular, and at least some of the women you list found fame by writing in this mode. The genre grew out of the conduct literature that was popular earlier in the century—for example, seduction novels that frightened girls and young women away from sexual impropriety—and was popular among women more so than men. For this reason, it was dismissed by serious authors—as when Hawthorne bemoaned the “damned mob of scribbling women.” What’s fascinating, though, is that sentimental literature was not just inviting women to read and weep. Today we recognize that it was a powerful political tool.’” (NPR)

• A Dutch painting dating to the seventeenth century and owned by queens Victoria and Elizabeth has been, for the last century, concealing a scatological joke. (Smithsonian)

• In a small South Carolina town, one activist is working to save—and reclaim—a historical marker meant to celebrate a race-based massacre. (Curbed)

• A new exhibit on the food art of early modern Europe proves that conspicuous consumption was an important part of being seventeenth-century nobility: “On view is one early seventeenth century hand-colored etching showing such a whimsical land, where meatballs bob in lakes, chickens rain down from clouds, hills are made of sugar cakes, and Spanish wine flows as a river.” (Hyperallergic)

• A church vicar in Redditch, England thinks he might have found the skull of William Shakespeare in a church vault, but he won’t be able to have it tested, courts say: “In a judgment running to nearly 7,000 words, Chancellor Mynors, a barrister, sided with prominent Shakespeare scholars who have rubbished the claims and concluded they read ‘like a piece of Gothic fiction.’” (The Telegraph)