Breakfast Links: Week of December 30, 2013

Happy new year! We're back with a bountiful collection of Breakfast Links for you - links to all our recent fav web sites, blogs, articles, and images, gathered for you from around the Twitterverse.
• Early circulating libraries and Jane Austen.
• Saving face: beauty for women workers during the First World War.
• Is the famous 19th c. painting Washington Crossing the Delaware obscene? Some schools have thought so.
• Rare 18th c. "Incroyable" male fashion doll displayed new styles to gentlemen.
• How humans made squirrels part of the urban environment.
• Another point of view: squirrels as symbols of Satan, of spite, and of saving.
• Michelangelo's handwritten (and illustrated) 16th c. grocery list.
• "You are certainly a very bad woman": the case of Mary Moriarty, a regular of the 1830s magistrates' courts.
• Before drivers' licenses and SSNs, some 19th c. civilians used the equivalent of commercial dog tags for ID.
• Image: Women in the dissection room, Women's Medical College of Pennsylvania, 1892.
• New Years gifts to the "deserving poor" from Queen Victoria, 1853.
• Animal crackers: the long English tradition of keeping exotic animals.
• Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, as translated into Latin and set in plainsong: amazingly beautiful, too.
• Victorian adventures and terrible tales, all part of the Illustrated Police News.
• Paws, pee, & mice: cats among medieval manuscripts.
• Making up Hollywood: makeup maven Max Factor, who created the "cupid's bow" lips and made Rudolph Valentino a heartthrob.
• Image: Two stones thrown by Suffragists at Buckingham Palace 100 years ago.
• Here come the brides! Behind-the-scenes blog leading up spring installation at the Victoria & Albert Museum of wedding gowns from 1775-2014.
• The most boring thing on your plate is about to get amazing: parsley, the herb of death.
• Christmas in prison in 1839.
• In the background: art you may never notice in museum dioramas.
• Jewish boxes as "enforcers" during the Covent Garden Old Price War of 1809.
• Electric corsets, the very thing for ladies c. 1890.
• Image: Sentimental or grotesque? Charles Dickens' letter opener, made from the taxidermied paw of his beloved pet cat, Bob.
• To make Lemon Cheesecakes: 18th c. recipe plus modern version.
• Weeping sailors: British manliness, 1760-1860.
• The snooty Astor Place Opera House in New York City is ruined when a rival secretly rents the house for a dog and monkey show in 1852.
• Be merry and drink perry, a popular 17th c. pear wine - even in Puritan Massachusetts.
• Human trophies: the skull is a familiar memento mori, but during the Second World War, it also became a controversial souvenir.
• New Years' gifts for Queen Elizabeth I, 1599-1600.
• Domestic cats enjoyed village life in China 5,300 years ago.
• Models on 1920s postcards labelled with the names of the real-life lovers who sent cards.
• Pitchcocked eels: English tavern dining in the 18th c.
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