• Days before Pride and Prejudice is to be published, Jane Austen writes to her sister Cassandra.
• Now freely available: 100,000 high-resolution images representing thousands of years of visual culture from the Wellcome Library.
• Grin and bear it: buttock cupping and other health "cures" of the past.
• A closer look at clogs.
• Image: In 1885 Vermont, Wilson Bentley became the first person to photograph a single snowflake.
• Romantic postcards of 1920s lovers in the moonlight.
• Sifting through the stories about the London Stone.
• A young woman carrying information across Revolutionary War lines gets caught in a wild chase on horseback.
• Image: "25 Starving Cats Eat Out a Butcher Store" in New York, 1914.
• Glorious 19th c. mansion on Riverside Drive, New York, was home to two separate millionaries who wed showgirls.
• The dragon and the grasshopper: two legendary weathervanes have overseen a lot of history.
• A menu & a moment in time, San Francisco, 1920-23.
• Jane Shore, a conspicuous courtesan of 15th c. England.
• Image: Women skiers, Norway, 1897.
• All in London: Kitkat Terrace, the Kit-Kat Club, and Cat and Mutton Bridge.
• The Royal Exchange, an early shopping center, was officially opened this week in 1571 by Queen Elizabeth I.
• Negotiating a pay raise - 18th c. style.
• Horrible Discovery in London! A notorious 19th c. crime in verse.
• Mad dogs, hens, and hot irons in early modern medicine.
• Consuelo's house: where do you live when you stop calling Blenheim home?
• A common American soldier: who really fought the American Revolution?
• A fascinating and tasty website featuring historic American church and social cookbooks.
• New York City received a lot of snow in 1856, and George Templeton Strong was not amused.
• A really, really thick manuscript - more than 2,000 pages - from around 1500.
• Fear of beards: "Many Americans continue to harbor 18th c. fears that beards marked maniacs, fanatics, and dissimulators."
• Fancy a gown in "puke", "gooseturd", or "lustie-gallant"? All are documented Elizabethan cloth colors.
• Image: This early 20th c. motorcycle-hearse was once considered for use by the Gressenhall Workhouse, Norfolk, as an economical way to return deceased inmates to their parishes for burial.
• Victorian bear pit now listed as historic site.
• Have you ever eaten skirrets, a now-forgotten staple of medieval British diets? 18th c. recipe for Skirret Pye.
• A closer look at a 1760s Lyon silk brocade court dress in blue and white.
• Image: Strolling in Vienna, Austria, 1914.
• "You should have known the Dodger": transportation as punishment and Dickens' Oliver Twist.
• Never too cold: crazy kids conquer Central Park and the snow on sleds in New York, c. 1910.
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3 comments:
Thanks again for your kind mention, ladies--always appreciated! I think I must relay (for Elizabeth's sake) that it was Jane Shore who was the "conspicuous courtesan" I was referencing and not QUEEN Elizabeth Woodville.They were accused of a conspiratorial plot involving witchcraft, however, which is what I really find interesting!
Reading about the New York gentlemen who married showgirls, I am reminded of Wodehouse's Jeeves:
"We must remember, however, that it is not unusual to find gentlemen of a certain age yielding to what might be described as a sentimental urge. They appear to experience what I may term a sort of Indian summer, a kind of temporarily renewed youth. The phenomenon is particularly noticeable, I am given to understand, in the United States of America among the wealthier inhabitants of the city of Pittsburg. It is notorious, I am told, that sooner or later, unless restrained, they always endeavor to marry chorus-girls. Why this should be so, I am at a loss to say, but--"
Donna, thanks for reminding us that Jane, not Elizabeth, is the courtesan in question, and we have have made the correction. Obviously the Breakfast Links required another cup of black coffee during production! :)
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