• On the Grimkés: “While white reformers might have disavowed ‘their complicity in America’s racial project…Black descendants rarely enjoyed the privilege of ignoring history.’ ” (Los Angeles Review of Books)

• The Los Angeles landmarks, including the Hollywood sign, that appeared in 1923. (Los Angeles Times)

• “Aztec and Inca societies used a huge number of aphrodisiacs, from peanuts to hallucinogenic mushrooms to insect larvae.” (JSTOR Daily)

• “Maryland archaeologists uncovered African religious artifacts on the Eastern Shore land where abolitionist Harriet Tubman was born into slavery in 1822.” (CBS News)

• “Painters have long struggled with the difficulties of depicting shadows, so much so that shadows—after a brief, spectacular showcase in ancient Roman paintings and mosaics—are almost absent from pictorial art up to the Renaissance and then are hardly present outside traditional Western art.” (The MIT Press Reader)

• Revisiting Roger Lewis’ biography of Anthony Burgess. (Tasteful Rude)

• A short history of the undead. (Perspectives on History)

• The 1977 killing of José Campos Torres. (Texas Monthly)

• “Outside of certain select phrases (‘the dignity of labor’), we don’t talk much about dignity in American politics, despite the fact that the demands of many groups for dignity and respect in public life have been a driving force in American history since the beginning. To that point, one of the great theorists of dignity and democracy in the United States was none other than Frederick Douglass, whose experience in bondage gave him a lifelong preoccupation with the ways that dignity is either cultivated or denied.” (New York Times)

• This week in obituaries: Raquel Welch, Georgina Hammick, Shoichiro Toyoda, David Jolicoeur, Carlos Saura, Hsing Yun, Howard Bragman, Paul Stewart Laing, Eugene Lee, Norman Dilworth, Roslyn Pope, Julian Wasser, John Eldridge, Hugh Hudson, Duangphet Promthep, Hans Modrow, John Harries, Arne Treholt, Kiernan “AKA” Forbes, Tom Nairn, and Robert Geddes.