Saturday, February 23, 2013

Breakfast Links: Week of February 18, 2013

Saturday, February 23, 2013
The Breakfast Links are back! Once again you'll find the best of our favorite links of the week via Twitter, all taking you to the most fascinating web sites, blogs, videos, articles, and photographs.
• 'L'Heure Blue': an 1890s gown of midnight blue velvet.
• A very happy 900th birthday to the Knights of Malta. 
• 18th c. chocolate by Liotard.
• Unusual cause of death for heavy drinkers in the past: spontaneous combustion.
• A 1901 Fifth Avenue mansion deemed "vulgar" becomes the focus of a catty court battle between wealthy socialites.
• A wonderful 1940s true-love story that began (and almost didn't) in a Japanese-American interment camp.
• The 17th c. cries of London that Samuel Pepys heard.
• Proust's famous madeleine was originally a ...biscotte?
• The Jane Austen guide to manliness.
• Why were newspapers in the 1890s obsessed with dog suicide?
Pendant of noble killed in 1306 by Robert Bruce found in field.
• The little-known dark side of Thomas Jefferson.
• Listen to an entire day of radio from 1939.
• How two women challenged fashion and ended the deadly feather trade.
• Georgian assembly rooms: attending a ball at a provincial assembly room.
• Formal attire for fancy strutting,  February 1903: the Welcome Cakewalk.
• Curtius's Grand Cabinet of Curiosities arrives in Birmingham, 1796.
• Debunking that popular 1858 photo of the crinolines and the omnibus.
• A Valentine to Daughter of Liberty Miss Mercy Scollay, fiancee to doomed Revolutionary War hero Dr. Joseph Warren.
• New women required a new shape: the rectangular silhouette of the flappers.
• A love letter by Henry VIII written to Anne Boleyn.
• The photographs John Wilkes Booth was carrying when he was captured.
Fake food that George Washington could have sunk his fake teeth into.
• Always the square jaw: seventy-five years of the changing face of Superman.
• The 15th c. equivalent of your cat walking on your keyboard.
• The Chevalier D'Eon: solider, spy, celebrity transvestite.
• He might have been the worst poet in the world, but his manuscript is set to sell for thousands at auction.
Laudanum or rhubarb? Yikes! Unsafe medicine in the 19th c.
• Floorplan of Sherlock Holmes' living quarters.

Hungry for more? Follow us on Twitter @2nerdyhistgirls and get fresh updates daily!

2 comments:

nightsmusic said...

Wonderful links this week! They were all very interesting, but the one that brought back memories for me was the last. When I was young, a family down the street had a field full of rhubarb and when it was ready to harvest, we'd help and our payment was fresh, raw stalks. But we were always reminded, not the leaves! Never eat the leaves. I'd forgotten those times. Thanks for the memory!

Audra said...

Great links -- love the story about the Manhanttan mansion -- I feel like it could be an episode out of one of the 'Real Housewives of...' shows!

 
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