AHA staff are eager consumers of great historical content, and we enjoy sharing our finds in our series What We’re Reading. Here are a few staff picks for articles published this week.

‘Deep’ History: Two Shipwrecks Discovered This Week

Shipwreck on the Coast of Norway, by Johan Christian Dahl, 1832.

Grim History Traced in Sunken Slave Ship Found Off South Africa
This week the National Museum of African-American History and Culture announced that, for the first time ever, the wreckage of a slave ship has been discovered off the coast of South Africa. This New York Times article highlights some of the challenges of writing the history of slavery–in terms of geography, objects, and documentation–as well as the challenges of building a collection for the NMAAHC, set to open in 2016.

Sunken Byzantine-Era Ship Found off the Coast of Crimea
Divers found this ship in the Black Sea, and archaeologists will begin studying it next month.

Updates in Public History

Best Practices for Establishing and Developing a Public History Program
This post invites comments on the National Council for Public Hisotry’s new “Best Practices for Establishing and Developing a Public History Program.”

Public History and Video Gaming: Spontaneous Digital Remembrance
An interesting blog post on Public History Commons asks whether public historians should be thinking about preserving virtual worlds created through multiplayer online role playing games.

Religion and History

Why Mark Zuckerberg wants everyone to read the 14th-century Islamic book ‘The Muqaddimah’
Social media is atwitter about why Facebook’s founder is reading Ibn Khaldun’s Introduction (to history).

Historian: The World Needs a New Origins Story Based on Science
On David Christian’s teaching of new “big history”–to replace religion’s versions.

Food History

What Does a Food Historian Do?
An interview with Ken Albala, Director of Food Studies at the University of the Pacific in San Francisco.

How Michael Pollan, Alice Waters, and Slow Food Theorists Got It All Wrong
Washingtonian magazine interviews food historian Rachel Laudan, who argues that “processed foods are easier to eat and digest, more nutritious, tastier, safer, and longer lasting.”

Remembrance as Art

If I Forget You, Don’t Forget Me
Artist Manal AlDowayan remembers the lives and experiences of the men who left their homes to work in Saudi Arabia’s oil industry 50 years ago.

Current Problems in Research

‘The Censor’s Hand’
An interview with Carl E. Schneider, the author of The Censor’s Hand: The Misregulation of Human-Subject Research, in which he argues that IRBs are an “inherently flawed system.”

This post first appeared on AHA Today.