Saturday, April 13, 2013

Breakfast Links: Week of April 8, 2013

Saturday, April 13, 2013
Breakfast Links are served! Our weekly round-up of fav links to other blogs, web sites, photographs, articles, & videos, all gathered for you from around the Twitterverse.
• An ingenious 1815 sewing compendium in the shape of the Brighton Pavilion.
• The important etiquette of good grooming, 1940.
• Heart-shaped ginger cakes: 18th c. recipe plus modern version.
• The squirrel is a symbol of Satan, and probably that will not surprise anyone.
• Seven famous people who fortunately missed the Titanic when it sailed 101 years ago this week.
• "A kiss from France": sentimental silk embroidered postcards, sent home during World War One.
• A charm of goldfinches, a drift of hogs, a kindle of kittens: how many terms of 15th c. venery do you know?
• Fascinating Theatre de la Mode from the 1940s: French high fashion in miniature.
• A 17th c. beadle's staff is among the historical relics of Norton Folgate.
• Cringe or starve: defining the deserving and undeserving poor in Victorian and Edwardian England.
• The Good Pub Guide for the 1500s tells you how to binge-drink for a few pence a week.
• When Dickens met Dostoevsky. Or not.
• An 18th c. French 'carnival mask' ring makes a remarkable statement of love.
• Weird relics and mementos include body parts and hangmen's ropes.
• For years this photograph was seen as the joyful, iconic V-J Day photo - but was it really sexual assault?
• Traces of a vanished occupation: lamplighters in 18th-19th c. British newspapers.
Starch, the devil's liquor? Maybe in the 16th c....
• Knitting a shower-proof golf coat and other vintage knitting patterns.
• Distilling the essence of Heaven: how alcohol could defeat the Antichrist.
• Giant grasshoppers! Vintage postcards show Americans' love of folksy exaggeration.
• A 1901 Victorian bath chair bought on Ebay, now lovingly restored to former glory.
• Exuberant English Renaissance calligraphy books.
• The Art of Kissing: a 1936 guide for lovers.
• Fascinating look at changing sleep patterns between 16th-17th c. and modern day (or night.)
• Only 50 years after construction, NYC's magnificent Havemeyer mansion falls to progress in 1915.
• Keats, Dylan, Fitzgerald, Dickinson, more: fascinating handwritten poems by famous authors.
• Recipe for 18th c. Spanish Pudding, spiced with a Moorish twist.
• Who was behind the 1920s fashions for flappers?
• "The severall places in London where you may hear news" in London, c. 1640.
• A right royal little video: the making of Henry VIII's crown.
Harriot Kezia Hunt (1805-1875), the first American woman to practice medicine professionally.
• With a taste for "extravagances and debaucheries": The Winchcombe Highwayman.
• The historical sociology of choosing baby names.
Hungry for more? Follow us on Twitter @2nerdyhistgirls for daily updates!

2 comments:

Chris Woodyard said...

Another super line-up (and thanks for the mention of the bizarre relics!) I want that Brighton sewing compendium for my miniatures collection.
Lovely to see the making of Henry VIII's crown. And I was fascinated by the BBC article on sleep. The Rule of St Benedict, which I've always thought of as a thoroughly sensible document, requires monks and nuns to rise for the "Night Office,"--the prayers and psalms of the Divine Office--in the middle of the night. To most of us it seems like some awful mortification of the flesh, but it makes perfect sense in view of the notion of first and second sleep.

Elizabeth Varadan, Author said...

These were wonderful! I especially liked the handwritten poems by famous poets. So moving to think of them scribbling away on anything that came to hand.

 
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