Breakfast Links: Week of January 5, 2013

It's a new year, and plenty of fresh new Breakfast Links – links to other blogs, web sites, photographs, videos, and articles, all gathered for you from around the Twitterverse.
• Why Jane Austen still matters, 200 years on.
• Fabulous, fun, and historic: Faberge pendant in form of a golden egg being cracked with a knife, c. 1890.
• Postcards from the edge: early 20th c. American picture postcards featuring lunatic & mental asylums.
• Photo: 5 megabyte hard drive from 1956, being forklifted onto plane.
• A new machine for winding up the ladies, 1829.
• Wonderful photo of Civil War camp scene with officer and family gathered in front of their tent, 1861-1865.
• This page of blue, green, and gold in the 15th c. Black Hours is a feast for the eyes.
• The Marquess of Buckingham's tribute to Queen Charlotte: The Queen's Temple at Stowe.
• Tea, tea rooms, and the suffrage movement.
• The morning toilette as an 18th c. social ceremony.
• Is that a woman holding a decapitated head on the New York Public Library?
• Lovely cream silk 1840s bonnet.
• Oh, Almanzo: Laura Ingalls Wilder's husband's homestead claim.
• True labor of love: amazing stitching in an infant's cotton lawn shirt, c 1702.
• Archaeologists find a 2,000 year old medicine chest at the bottom of the ocean - with surprising contents.
• In honor of David Bowie's birthday this week: rock stars (and groupies!) get budget-cut memos, too, 1972.
• Fit for "Festes Royalle": the fancy jellies served to Henry VIII.
• Some 18th c. cold remedies, none of them nice.
• Forget the Uggs! Fabulous fur-lined carriage boots, late 19th-early 20th c.
• "The Strap-Hammock": on deluxe London underground trains, cartoon from 1906 Punch magazine.
• While Central Park may overshadow them, the history of New York's small parks matters, too.
• Take the Witch Test: would you have been at risk of persecution as a witch in 17th c. Britain?
• Ghostly decaying daguerrotypes from the Library of Congress.
• A happy hedgehog by Hans Hoffmann, c. 1580.
• Party planning, 1867: The Conversazione
• The drinking habits of John Falls, aged 110. (1754)
Hungry for more? Follow us on Twitter @2nerdyhistgirls for fresh tweets throughout the day!