• Meet a “self-described ‘proprietress of weird medieval guys.’ ” (Input)

• On the Reverse Freedom Rides. (Code Switch)

• Watch two women recall delightful anecdotes about growing up in Victorian London—featuring mud, fog, and “enjoying ourselves”—for the BBC in 1970. (Aeon)

• The history of America’s longleaf pines: “Forestry books on longleaf are filled with quotations…many of which are fond of acknowledging that in 1608 the first export from the Jamestown Colony back to England consisted of wooden poles, wooden shakes (a kind of rough-split wooden shingle), pitch, and tar—all products of longleaf pine. Longleaf became one of the colony’s chief sources of revenue, an increasingly important commodity for the naval-based economy of the British Empire: The wood was straight and hard and resistant to decay; it made good planks in ships and good timber for the construction of fences and homes.” (Orion)

• “Salman al-Nabahin, a farmer from Gaza’s Bureij refugee camp, was trying to plant new olive trees in his orchard but something underneath the soil was standing in his way. He investigated for three months, digging out the soil with his son until they unearthed a stunningly well-preserved Byzantine floor mosaic.” (Hyperallergic)

• Revisiting defunct fallout shelters: “I’m really struck at the enormous fraud that was perpetrated on the public.” (Gothamist)

• The history absent from The Woman King. (NewYorker.com)

• Dealing with inflation during the Civil War and Reconstruction. (Public Books)

• This week in obituaries: John Train, Valery Polyakov, Henry Silva, Virginia Dwan, Allan M. Siegal, Ken Howard, Dave Caulkin, Herbert Kohler, Maury Wills, John W. O’Malley, Robert Ferrante, John Stearns, Jorja Fleezanis, Saul Kripke, Arnold Tucker, and L. Lowry Mays.