• “Some historians argue that you can’t blame Christopher Columbus for being a product of his time, which is a nice, convenient story. Nevertheless, contemporary accounts of Columbus’ senseless cruelty, and his subsequent arrest for his behavior, suggests that even taking racist historical attitudes into account, this was unspeakably barbaric. Once you know the full stomach-churning story, it’s hard to imagine how such a person, who treated whole populations as less than human, could be celebrated.” (JSTOR Daily)

• Found: “a massive sculpture of an African American Last Supper.” (Washingtonian)

• Also found: twenty ancient coffins. (Associated Press)

• Still missing: Amelia Earhart’s plane. (Pictorial)

• “Throughout modern history, the weight of Western colonialism in the name of freedom and religious liberty has distorted the nature of the Middle East. It has transformed the political geography of the region by creating a series of small and dependent Middle Eastern states and emirates where once stood a large interconnected Ottoman sultanate.” (Aeon)

• “The North Carolina Klan thought burning crosses would scare the Lumbee tribe out of Robeson County. That’s not how things went down.” (Narratively)

• Dublin is trying to repatriate James Joyce’s body: “If it goes ahead, the plan would coincide with the centenary of Ulysses in 2022. The novel was once effectively banned in Ireland, as the Irish government used a customs loophole to prevent it from entering the country.” (The Guardian)

• “A phrenological logic is lurking in any intellectual discipline that attempts, whether deliberately or otherwise, to depoliticize the human world: to stitch the contingent injustices of our present form of life into the fabric of the universe; to turn them from something we might hope to change, to something that we can at best merely describe.” (The Outline)

• “Determining whether a family of witches lived at Malkin Tower Farm will require a careful cataloguing of the hundreds of objects.” (Archaeology)

• On Angela, “the first named African woman in Jamestown.” (USA Today)

• The political and societal forces that birthed Silicon Valley. (The Nation)

• “A transatlantic investigation conducted by a Washington museum and a London-based archaeological group has accused a prominent Oxford University professor of stealing and selling fragments of ancient texts to Hobby Lobby, the arts-and-crafts chain.” (New York Times)

• This week in obituaries: a member of Congress, a photographer, a literary critic, an Irish prankster, a New Yorker cartoonist, an actor, and the first person to walk in space.