• On Max Ernst’s collage novels: “More than three-quarters of a century on, the collage novels still cast an unsettling spell, plunging us into a gaslit Victorian underworld of the unconscious, part magic lantern show, part séance, all Freudian uncanny.” (Hyperallergic)

• The former slaves who believed and told the Federal Writers’ Project that Abraham Lincoln visited their plantation in disguise. (TheAtlantic.com)

• The bizarre legal history of broken engagements. (Smithsonian.com)

• How Thomas Hardy the architect built a fictional world. (Places Journal)

• Why so many places in Northern England have Scandinavian-sounding names. (Archaeology)

• A new exhibit highlights mid-twentieth century London’s East End in colorful prints. (Atlas Obscura)

• There is a place in the United States where you can stare at twelve thousand historical valentines. (New York Times)

• Angela Y. Davis’ papers are going to Harvard. (Harvard Gazette)