• “Belief in ghosts was not actually common across the Middle Ages.” (Medievalists.net)

• The history of indigenous radio stations. (Texas Observer)

• Meet Achsa Sprague. (Narratively)

• On the literature of passing. (Vulture)

• “When journalists talk about refugees at Guantánamo—something they rarely do to begin with—they often refer to the 1990s; the 1970s drop out entirely.” (Boston Review)

• “Solar storm confirms Vikings settled in North America exactly a thousand years ago.” (The Guardian)

• On David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything. (The Atlantic)

• “To talk about a newer, broader history of the American Revolution is to talk about older history to the revolution as well—what they missed, what they ignored, and what they got right.” (The Ezra Klein Show)

• “A new history of the race to decipher DNA reveals Shakespearean plots of scheming.” (Nautilus)

• “The horse you rode in on may have been made in southern Russia.” (New York Times)

• On the Defenders of State Sovereignty and Individual Liberties. (The Sword and the Sandwich)

• “About two hundred years before Mexico’s independence, in 1609, the city known today as Yanga, located in the state of Veracruz, won an important battle against the Spanish crown, paving their way to freedom and becoming the first self-liberated and independent town in the Americas.” (JSTOR Daily)

• This week in obituaries: Colin Powell, Earl Old Person, Laura Marcus, Jerry Pinkney, Tom Morey, Timuel Black, Leslie Bricusse, Edita Gruberova, Alan Lapidus, Anni Bergman, David Finn, Robert Haas, Jeannette Altwegg, Betty Lynn, and Owen Luder.