AHA staff are eager consumers of great historical content, and we enjoy sharing our finds in our series What We’re Reading.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.

Historical Perspectives on the Confederate Flag

History Is Not Heritage
In this polemic, historian Steven Conn sees the current debate over the Confederate flag as “a divide not simply over how it is viewed but how the past itself should be understood. It is a difference between those who view the past as history and those who see it as heritage.”

What Was the Confederate Flag Doing in Cuba, Vietnam, and Iraq?
New York University’s Greg Grandin provides historical context on how the meaning of the “Stars and Bars” has transformed and evolved to American servicemen over the course of the late 19th and 20th centuries.

History and Technology

Women on bicycles in the late 19th century. Public domain. on Wikipedia.

What is Detected?
Among the many problems with plagiarism detection software is that it doesn’t work. Learn more at Inside HigherEd.

Print Wikipedia Project Reaches Final Entry
What would it look like if you printed out Wikipedia? The recently concluded project Print Wikipedia is “an effort to envision all of English-language Wikipedia as an old-fashioned dead-tree reference set.”

The Bicycle and the Ride to Modern America
Much about 20th century technology started with the bicycle. The New York Times has the story.

In the Government

Damning Revelations Prompt Social Science to Rethink Its Ties to the Military
The Chronicle of Higher Education presents a historical perspective on the relationship between social science and the US government.

In Journalism

Those Slippery Snake Stories: How a handful of newspapers covered the same event in 1904
“The proliferation of contradictory accounts reveal the cacophonous early days of professional journalism.”

In Nature

The Really Big One
The big and recent history and terrifying future of the Cascadia subduction zone.

This post first appeared on AHA Today.