Breakfast Links: Week of January 13, 2014

Time for Breakfast Links! Here's our weekly round-up of favorite links to other blogs, web sites, images, and articles, all gathered for you from around the Twitterverse.
• Spangles, sequins, and spangs, o my! All about historic sparklies.
• Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens, & George Crukshank.
• Edgar Degas paints fellow-artist Mary Cassatt – and here, too.
• Celestial charts, 1823, attributed to a mysterious "lady", were perforated to light the stars.
• Cock ale, a 17th c. "homely" aphrodisiac.
• Not just Sherlock Holmes: the list of Baker Street's famous residents include William Pit the Younger.
• How Monopoly helped WWII prisoners escape.
• Notorious Georgian celebrity Elizabeth Chudleigh: public near-nakedness & bigamy.
• Image: From The Times, 1853: the original story that inspired 12 Years a Slave.
• Mr. Grimstone and the revitalized Mummy Pea: a taste of Ancient Egypt in Victorian London.
• If you have 4 "sivil oranges", then you can make this 18th c. recipe for Orange Cream.
• A kangaroo in a 16th c. manuscript could change modern understanding of Australia's history.
• The archives of Chatsworth House contain over 1150 letters by Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire; here are two.
• Image: a gentleman never swims without a top hat.
• Dating advert from The Times, 1832: "I want a woman to look after the pigs while I am out at work."
• From 'unlike' to 'flash mob': five words that are older than you think.
• Have King Alfred the Great's bones been discovered in Winchester?
• Sit up straight! Bad posture and the "neck swing" in the 18th c.
• Perhaps the most bizarre disaster in US history: the Boston Molasses Flood.
• Image: Early photo of the town of Haworth, c 1870, had not changed much since the Brontës lived there.
• T.L.Busby's Costume of the Lower Orders, 1820.
• Actress Vivien Leigh was a wartime star - and a knitter for the cause, too.
• The very definition of a "hostile takeover": East India Company violence towards a Portuguese ship, 1626.
• Conceal and carry gun moll, 1923, Chicago (plus what exactly 'gun moll' means.)
• A "bone automata": hand-carved French folk art, c. 1820, is a miniature working guillotine.
• Image: Now this is a library! Real Biblioteca del Monasterio de San Lorenzo del Escorial en Madrid (Espana)
• Rare color photos of circus showgirls of the 1940s-1950s.
• The magnificent Renaissance banquets for the wedding of Annibale Ill Bentivoglio and Lucrezia d'Este.
• "Ooh, if I just wasn't a lady, what wouldn't I tell that varmint": hoop skirts, the New Deal, and Gone with the Wind.
• Margaret Beaufort, mother of the Tudor dynasty of kings.
• George I's chocolate-making kitchen uncovered at Hampton Court.
• The fascinating story behind one of the most well-known emblems of old time Main Street: the cigar store Indian.
• Image: Illustration from a medieval manuscript; or, if Game of Thrones gets really weird.
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