cannot get much more pulpy than comics

I love that Ed Brubaker & Matt Fraction are drawing from pulp traditions, like referencing relatively larger-than-life historical figures to flesh out the story. Immortal Iron Fist #7, the Pirate Queen of Pinghai Bay obviously was inspired in part by the real pirate queen Cheng I Sao. Brubaker's Wu Ao-Shi is a very different character after all. She's an Iron Fist, not a ruthless, somewhat innovative businesswoman.

It kind of has the feel of a more noble version of entry from a book like A Universal History of Infamy. Most cool.

damnatio memoriae

Lucrezia Borgia's daddy was such an awful pope, that they destroyed art containing his image. Portions of a fresco might have survived though. Inquisitions are cool, but decadent philandering and indulgence means destroying art? Bastards!

the forgotten jazz landmarks of New Orleans

New Orleans never can do enough to secure its own heritage. Some great citizens are making heroic efforts to document sites relevant to the history of jazz. I hadn't even stopped to think that Jelly Roll Morton's house might still be standing. It is, and someone is hellbent on preserving it. For a city that makes tourism its primary industry, the amount of heritage that gets overlooked and neglected is insane.

plagues of 16th century Mexico may have been native

Picking this up from ArchaeoBlog. It sounds familiar. Searching for Rodolfo Acuña-Soto turns up the actual paper Large epidemics of hemorrhagic fever in Mexico 1545-1815 as well as a Discover article from February 2006. Even the Aztecs did not think that the epidemic of 1545 was smallpox, which they were already familiar with, identifying it as zahuatl, while this later plague was called cocolitzli, and was recorded as having significantly different symptoms. Cocolitzli started in the highlands and not by the sea. Curious.