Saturday, April 5, 2014

Breakfast Links: Week of March 31, 2014

Saturday, April 5, 2014
Despite a week that included April Fools Day, we've whipped up a fresh serving of breakfast links - our weekly round-up of fav links to other blogs, web sites, articles, and images, all gathered from around the Twitterverse.
• Exquisite engravings of long-lost London.
• St. George and Peterodactyl: the bizarre, Romantic, not-quite-scientific dinosaurs of Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins.
• The Amazons: is there a history behind the myth of the women warriors?
Video: New replica of a working drawbridge unveiled at the Tower of London.
• Highlights from the 20,000+ historical maps recently made available online by the New York Public Library.
• "The Deadly Nevergreen": public hangings at Tyburn.
• The first Pony Express riders set off on April 3, 1860. Image of the early riders.
• Why you shouldn't marry a lady of learning, 1708.
• The future of travel as seen from 1829: kite-ships, horseless carriages, vacuum trains, the lot.
• A brief history of London crypts.
• Beautiful early photographs of people of African descent during the Victorian period.
Image: Man and woman, Lacock Abbey, photographed by Fox Talbot in 1835.
• The ten best bad mother-villains in literature.
• A complete chronological list of Charles Dickens' opening sentences.
• Photographic reality vs. artistic vision: side by side pictures of painter Dante Gabriel Rosetti's models.
• A 1,800 year old letter home on papyrus from a Roman soldier recently deciphered.
Image: Fashion in Paris, c 1930s. Photo by Agence Meurisse.
• Watercolor costume sketches for a Persian-inspired opera from 1740.
• To relieve boredom, the 19-year-old Prince of Wales played leap frog in the corridors of New York's now-lost Fifth Avenue Hotel in 1860.
Image: British issue proclamation encouraging slaves to run away from American masters, April, 1814.
• From Little Fanny to Fluffy Ruffles: the scrappy history of paper dolls.
• A now-famous April Fools blog from the British Library features a Unicorn Cookbook.
Elizabeth of York, the first Tudor Queen of England.
• The magnificent letterhead of "Mademoiselle Paula, The Famous Reptile Conquerer," 1899.
Image: "Clara Bow is in my driveway. She's yelling something about baseball starting today."
• "False pregnancies" in 18th c. France.
• A visit to the 1849 lighthouse on Execution Rock near Port Washington, NY.
• About sixty paintings of 1600s families.
Barmy baking: 18th c. recipe for Plain Cakes, or Barm Brack.
• "His spread-eagle collars kept New Yorkers agog": the Gilded Age socialite dubbed the "King of the Dudes."
Image: Sometimes an obelisk is just an obelisk; this is clearly not one of those times.
• A medieval historian compares the women of Game of Thrones to the real deal.
• Punished for being poor: London's forgotten workhouses.
• On April 4, 1581, Sir Francis Drake threw a very special banquet.
• The exciting history and origin of the cocktail umbrella.
Hungry for more? Follow us on Twitter @2nerdyhistgirls for fresh updates daily.

2 comments:

Isabella Bradford/Susan Holloway Scott said...

Apparently two of this week's links didn't work - the 1930s fashion and the Tower of London drawbridge. My apologies! Sometimes links are changed by the original posters during the week, and sometimes, too, it's just mysterious internet mishaps. Regardless, I've corrected the two broken links with fresh ones, and here they are below as well, to make things easier:

Image: 1930s fashions: http://www.vintag.es/2014/01/paris-ca-1930s.html?m=1

Drawbridge video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Ystd_V8tN4

Linda Olson said...

Thank you so much for your marvelous Breakfast Links. I always find something (and usually several somethings) of particular interest to me, from pre-Victorian futurism to cocktail history. Keep up the good work!

 
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