Saturday, April 27, 2013

Breakfast Links: Week of April 22, 2013

Saturday, April 27, 2013
Gathered just for you - this week's assortment of our fav links to other website, blogs, articles, and pictures, fresh from the Twitterverse.
• Dainty 19th c. footwear designed to protect the status quo.
• The end of an era: Dewey's own card catalogs in Columbia's library to be retired.
• An 1817 crib sheet for dancers who didn't quite know what they were doing.
• Indian shawls: their history & popularity.
• "Husbands hoped the bottles would be full upon their return": Civil War tear catchers.
• A young American artist abroad: Whistler's etchings of Limehouse & Wapping, 1859.
Elizabeth Keckley, former slave who became Mrs. Lincoln's dressmaker.
• Unusual 18th c. gravestone from Newport RI for two children, plus their mother's amputated arm.
• Love is in the air - courtesy of Thomas Rowlandson.
• Homemade remedies from 200 years ago include a mixture of whiskey, water, and chlorodyne for hysteria.
• Newly discovered four-thousand-year-old skeleton, adorned with gold, was likely member of ruling elite.
Lord Byron asks his publisher to lie for him about authorship of a poem called The Waltz, 1813.
Joan Beaufort, 15th c. queen of Scotland.
• Perfect for trysting: garden alcoves.
• "The infamous Dr. Foulkes", the 'black villain' of 18th c. physick.
• Oliver Cromwell's "gay attire."
• An improbably survivor: a 19th c. carriage house somehow perseveres in Manhattan.
• The phantom coffin makers as an omen of death.
John Hearn, aged 12, arrested for stealing 11 pieces of leather (scroll down.)
• Victorian spring puddings and rhubarb.
• Author F.Scott Fitzgerald's finances: alcoholism & the question of downward economic mobility.
• The housewifely concerns of 17th c. gentlewoman Johanna St. John.
Etiquette tips from the 1950s from Amy Vanderbilt, who clearly knew EVERYTHING.
• Victorian sensibilities: dildos and didon'ts.
• Painted buttons that may have belonged to Toussaint l'Ouverture, 18th c. former slave who became ruler of Haiti.
• Dorset is full of marvelous place names. This may be the best.
• In 1774, a sailor claims the British military kidnapped him to force him to accuse "King Hancock" of leading the Tea Party.
• Out and about: Fred Astaire's tuxedo.
• How paperback books changed the reading habits of an entire nation in the 1940s.
• Heroes of Slang (and a bawdy one, too) : John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester.
• Queen Charlotte swore by it! Recipe To Thicken Hair, 1871.
• The apartments of MesDames at Versailles.
• If I die young: a brief history of funeral invitations.
• The brazen bibliophiles of Timbuktu - how a team of sneaky librarians duped Al Qaeda.
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4 comments:

Quinn said...

Oh my goodness...where to begin???

Lil said...

Did you notice that in Hannah Glasse's recipe for rhubarb tart she says, "the leaves of rhubarb are a fine thing to eat for a pain in the stomach"?
LOL
Well, that would certainly make sure you never again suffered a pain in the stomach!

Chris Woodyard said...

More gems today, ladies--from the sublime--garden nooks, shawls, and Mesdames apartments--to the, well, dildoes... Golly.
Thanks, too, for the link to the Phantom Coffin-makers. Who knew that the sound of hammering could be so sinister?

QNPoohBear said...

great links! I'm hoping to get to RISD to see the Artist, Dandy, Rebel exhibit. I have to go when it's free because I'm broke.

 
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