• On the birds that nest inside our historical imagination: “Birds were certainly ‘good to think with’ in the ancient world.” (Aeon)

• How to accessorize like a classics professor. (The Strategist)

• On the work of labor historians. (Dissent)

• “In a legal environment that relies so heavily on precedent the shadow of the retreat from Reconstruction still hangs over contemporary jurisprudence.” (New York Times)

• Sarah Bernhardt, queen of the pre-internet: “You could say she understood the art of the meme well before ‘meme’ was a term in circulation.” (Pictorial)

• The remnants of the French and Indian War left in upstate New York. (Archaeology)

• Useful knowledge: how to dress like an eighteenth-century gentleman. (Aeon)

• Radical pockets and the Polymuriel. (Narratively)

• The birth of car culture in New York City, as told by examining three different streets. (Gothamist)

• Victor Hugo in Guernsey. (Longreads)

• On William Gropper. (The Nation)

• Who was Mary E. Harper? (The Conversation)

• This week in obituaries: a photographer, an editor, a radical sociologist, a singer-songwriter, a billionaire, a novelist, a Dutch resistance fighter, and a “hair care pioneer.”