• Frederick Douglass on monuments. (Smithsonianmag.com)

• “Before spicy came spice: the history of curry before Columbus is a history of spice.” (Contingent)

• Remembering Archer Alexander. (The New Republic)

• “The Racism of ‘Ole Miss’ Is Hiding in Plain Sight.” (Mother Jones)

• “Experts believe the remains of up to five hundred people guillotined during the French Revolution may be buried in the walls of a listed monument in Paris.” (The Guardian)

• On Posadism. (Art in America)

• “We would do well to remember, too, that queer people considered themselves married long before the state sanctioned it. The convicts on Grundy’s ship—deprived of basic rights, exiled from their homeland, abused by the officials and guards of the prison administration—adopted the language of marriage even when the mere act of sex risked brutal punishment.” (NewYorker.com)

• Meet “the emperor of runestones.” (Archaeology)

• “It can feel remarkable to recall that Manchester, in 1900, was one of the ten largest cities on the planet, with a greater metropolitan population just shy of two million.” (Places Journal)

• How Swedish Americans became “white.” (JSTOR Daily)

• An oral history of The Onion’s 9/11 issue. (MEL)

• On the discoveries of Joseph von Fraunhofer. (Nautilus)

• “When a group of Black mothers in Ohio were told to wait for school integration, they started marching every day in protest. They kept going for nearly eighteen months.” (The Atavist)

• On Victorian novelists’ love of writing about terrible doctors. (The Public Domain Review)

• “The Role of Almanacs in Nineteenth-Century Popular Medicine.” (Nursing Clio)

• Confederate memorials and “degenerate art.” (Artforum)

• On swimming. (Literary Review)

• What’s the point of the National Statuary Hall Collection? (Boston Review)

• Reading George Orwell in light of recent protests. (Slate)

• What to do with “Les Vues d’Amérique du Nord” wallpaper in 2020. (The New Yorker)

• This week in obituaries: Milton Glaser, Carl Reiner, Everton Weekes, Angela Madsen, Hachalu Hundessa, Ida Haendel, Rudolfo Anaya, Mike East, Anders Ericsson, Gregory Katz, Muhammad Anwar, Lucius J. Barker, Zdena Tomin, Elsa Joubert, Freddy Cole, Johnny Mandel, and Margarita Pracatan.