• Nine slave testimonials recorded by the Works Progress Administration in Alabama in 1937. (Montgomery Advertiser)

• Ranking the effectiveness of various foods thrown in protest across history. (Eater)

• “While scholars painstakingly examine the interconnections of slavery and capitalism, showing the complex traffic between Northern industrial and Southern cotton economies, too many of our popular accounts still view slavery as the South’s ‘peculiar institution’ and treat it as a discrete, if horrifying, historical anomaly. This is how disavowal manages cognitive dissonance: it means conceding the existence of slavery, while refusing to believe that it has anything to do with the story you are telling; it means willfully pushing slavery to the edges of your consciousness and being saved by the logic of exception.” (NYR Daily)

• Archaeologists have found artificial islands in the Outer Hebrides that are older than Scotland, making some of them think that “we really need to reconsider what we know.” (National Geographic)

• What did Agatha Christie’s disappearance look like from the perspective of confused newspaper coverage? (New York Times)

• Reading The Westing Game, a children’s book inspired by labor history. (NewYorker.com)

• On the Jubilee Singers. (Topic)

• Innovations in hating women in seventeenth-century France, transformed in the twentieth century into a way to sell pasta. (The Public Domain Review)

• “Literary recovery projects are vital, and there is still so much that has been written not available to the public. Those works are not being written about or talked about and I know they could have incredible significance.” (Pictorial)

• The welfare rights activists who fought to reimagine welfare and the assumptions behind it. (NPR)

• “The effects of the internet on historiography cannot be overstated.” (The New Republic)

• On pioneers and American myths: “Who has time for stories that tell the same old lies?” (Literary Hub)

• Grapes have not changed much for the past thousand years, as a seed found in a medieval cesspit shows. (TheAtlantic.com)

• Looking back at 150 years of women voting in Wyoming. (Smithsonian.com)

• This week in obituaries: Bushwick Bill, Dr. John, Jiggs Kalra, Camille Billops, Tsuruko Yamazaki, and the Queen of Cake.