• “By the time a country gets to the point that those in power and a majority of their supporters embrace policies that back up virulent rhetoric and accept detention as the central response to a political or humanitarian problem, it is very difficult to undo.” (GQ)

• On Harriet Tubman and the not beautiful currency of America. (NewYorker.com)

• “It’s difficult to say who the original Pompeians were. But if you dig…you start to see that Pompeii is a site with a very long history.” (Archaeology)

• Read Ta-Nehisi Coates’ statement to Congress about reparations and understanding the history of the United States, and how that history exists in the present. (Slate)

• A museum that tells the story of Weeksville, a free black community founded in Brooklyn, will remain open after a fundraising push and help from the city. (Curbed)

• It’s Jazzercise’s fiftieth birthday; here’s an explanation of why the derided fad is culturally still relevant. (TheAtlantic.com)

• On Maggie Walker’s bank. (Scalawag)

• Paris is trying to turn its landmarks into miniature forests. (CityLab)

• The deeply racist content on nostalgic history-related Facebook groups. (New Statesman)

• How to tell a story about imperial women in China when you don’t have their words, but you do have the objects they owned and made. (Hyperallergic)

• Listen to Wade in the Water, an NPR series from 1994 on the history of American gospel music. (NPR)

• Here’s the first entry in a series on W.E.B. Du Bois’ Black Reconstruction in America. (Society for U.S. Intellectual History)

• “This is the problem that Mozart poses for our contemporary ears. His music is so balanced, clear, rational in its order, especially in comparison to the music that has come after, that it is easy—for performers as well as listeners—to miss the drama. Which is why we have to turn to the one place where drama cannot be ignored: opera.” (Times Literary Supplement)

• On neolithic gender inequality. (Cosmos)

• Follow Paul Salopek as he traces the paths of human migration: “My onward routing—and it should be pointed out that I don’t know exactly where I’ll be walking next Tuesday, much less in a year—involves traversing China and Russia, hitching a ride on a cargo ship across the Bering Strait, to Alaska, and hiking down the Americas to the final continental horizon of our species: the Beagle Channel, in Argentina.” (NewYorker.com)

• This week in obituaries: Gloria Vanderbilt, Franco Zeffirelli, Philip Osment, William Loverd, Dr. Elizabeth Barrett-Connor, and Mohamed Morsi.