• “John Wyatt Greenlee, a medieval historian focusing on cartography, never intended to become the “Surprised Eel Historian.” (Atlas Obscura)

• “History is how we understand ourselves, as people and as a nation, but writing biography across the centuries creates a problem of context. Should the writer try to reproduce the age she is writing about, or should she use her modern knowledge to critically reinterpret the past?” (The Nation)

• The history of the Indian Child Welfare Act. (Code Switch)

• “At a Neolithic site in southern Turkey, archaeologists unearthed a complex of buildings that had been buried, intentionally. How might we understand such strange architectural graveyards?” (Places Journal)

• On the organizing efforts of the Colored Farmers’ Alliance in the nineteenth century. (Jacobin)

• “First records of human kissing may date back a thousand years earlier than estimated.” (The Guardian)

• The history of the legal distinction between land and sea. (The Dial)

• This week in obituaries: Pema Tseden, Marlene Hagge-Vossler, Doyle Brunson, Gerald Rose, Gloria Molina, Sam Zell, Slava Zaitsev, Roger Mills, Gary Prado Salmón, Superstar Billy Graham, Ralph Lee, Don Denkinger, Mike Pride, Larry Mahan, Hodding Carter III, Bill Oesterle, Robert E. Lucas Jr., Bill Saluga, Owen Davidson, Amy Silverstein, and Iain Johnstone.