• On Hillsdale College’s 1776 Curriculum and the documentary series based on the 1619 Project. (The New York Review of Books)

• The history of the wedding cake topper. (Dilettante Army)

• “The strands of medicine, consciousness expansion, intoxication, addiction, and crime were tightly entangled in fin-de-siècle Paris, where ether and chloroform circulated among bohemian demi-mondaines alongside morphine, opium, cocaine, hashish, and wormwood-infused absinthe.” (The Public Domain Review)

• “It’s difficult to think of any kind of gun law that you can think of today that didn’t exist in some form 150, 200, 300 years ago. In many respects, guns and weapons were more strictly regulated in our first three hundred years of history than in the last thirty years.” (Slate)

• “How Did Fake Antiquities End Up at a Presidential Library?” (Hyperallergic)

• “Was the Conspiracy That Gripped New York in 1741 Real?” (JSTOR Daily)

• Revisiting Maus: “sometimes the only lesson is that there are none, and learning that can take decades.” (The Nation)

• “Ancient Romans Dropped Their Bling Down the Drain, Too.” (New York Times)

• Making housemaid’s coffee. (The Stopgap)

• This week in obituaries: Gordon Lightfoot, Yvonne Jacquette, Pamela Timmins, Dorothy Bohm, Ralph Boston, Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Jean Argles, Tori Bowie, John Stobart, Harold Kushner, LeRoy Carhart, Larry “Gator” Rivers, Robert Patrick, Billy “The Kid” Emerson, Keshub Mahindra, Carl MacDougall, Jerry Mander, and Jordan Neely.