• Putting COVID-19 in its historical place: Saint Corona, the Florentine Codex, Saʿdi Shirazi, social distancing, New York, Jim Crow, the fleeing wealthy, beards, loneliness, permafrost, teaching plague metaphors during a pandemic, newspapers in 1918, and the power epidemics have to change how people live.

• Matilda McCrear, the last known survivor of the transatlantic slave trade. (BBC News)

• When club swinging was a trend. (The Public Domain Review)

• On Amy March. (Los Angeles Review of Books)

• Artifacts found at Australia’s longest-running mental asylum: “No matter how good or effective the care they received here, they were still denied from telling their stories and sharing their experiences of life with the world.” (ABC News)

• Revisiting Not the New York Times. (New York Times)

• Celebrating the theremin. (WNYC)

• The history of the bulletproof vest. (Smithsonian.com)

• “Cave find shows Neanderthals collected seafood, scientists say.” (The Guardian)

• Vocational training for Native women: “Federal officials wanted indigenous women to force their families and those around them to adopt and maintain white, middle-class standards and to shun their cultures, languages, and values. This training influenced generations of indigenous people, and impacted almost every aspect of Native women’s lives, including how they experienced pregnancy and childbirth.” (Nursing Clio)

• The story of Ishi and the stolen wealth used to make land-grant universities possible. (High Country News)

• Remembering Vita Sackville-West as she was—and not as an appendage to a more famous writer. (Paris Review Daily)

• This week in obituaries: Juan Sanabria, Hilda Churchill, William Helmreich, Lorena Borjas, Adam Schlesinger, April Dunn, Ellis Marsalis, Wallace Roney, Joe Diffie, James T. Goodrich, Joseph A. O’Hare, Michael Sorkin, Kevin Thomas Duffy, Eddie Large, Tomie dePaola, Fuad Nahdi, Stuart Gordon, Tom Coburn, Jan Howard, Lord Garel-Jones, Manolis Glezos, and Jeremy Marre.