• A newly discovered inscription at Pompeii gives a party report that involves many couches and gladiators. (Live Science)

• “There are many debutante balls in Texas, and a number of pageants that feature historical costumes, but the Society of Martha Washington Colonial Pageant and Ball in Laredo is the most opulently patriotic among them.” (The Believer)

• Civil War smell cures. (National Museum of Civil War Medicine)

• On seeing in color. (Nautilus)

• Nine-thousand-year-old remains found in the UK. (BBC News)

• In which a historian takes the British citizenship test. (History Today)

• An oral history of Lilith Fair. (Vanity Fair)

• A history of Manhattan traffic. (Curbed)

• On Emma Tenayuca, a twenty-year-old labor leader in Texas. (Literary Hub)

• The hundredth anniversary of perhaps “the most lethal episode of racial violence in American history, with the possible exception of the much better-known Tulsa Race Riot of 1921.” (NYR Daily)

• This week in obituaries: José José, Jessye Norman, Elaine Feinstein, Michael Coe, Mary Abbott, and Jimmy Spicer.