Breakfast Links: Week of March 31, 2014

Despite a week that included April Fools Day, we've whipped up a fresh serving of breakfast links - our weekly round-up of fav links to other blogs, web sites, articles, and images, all gathered from around the Twitterverse.
• Exquisite engravings of long-lost London.
• St. George and Peterodactyl: the bizarre, Romantic, not-quite-scientific dinosaurs of Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins.
• The Amazons: is there a history behind the myth of the women warriors?
• Video: New replica of a working drawbridge unveiled at the Tower of London.
• Highlights from the 20,000+ historical maps recently made available online by the New York Public Library.
• "The Deadly Nevergreen": public hangings at Tyburn.
• The first Pony Express riders set off on April 3, 1860. Image of the early riders.
• Why you shouldn't marry a lady of learning, 1708.
• The future of travel as seen from 1829: kite-ships, horseless carriages, vacuum trains, the lot.
• A brief history of London crypts.
• Beautiful early photographs of people of African descent during the Victorian period.
• Image: Man and woman, Lacock Abbey, photographed by Fox Talbot in 1835.
• The ten best bad mother-villains in literature.
• A complete chronological list of Charles Dickens' opening sentences.
• Photographic reality vs. artistic vision: side by side pictures of painter Dante Gabriel Rosetti's models.
• A 1,800 year old letter home on papyrus from a Roman soldier recently deciphered.
• Image: Fashion in Paris, c 1930s. Photo by Agence Meurisse.
• Watercolor costume sketches for a Persian-inspired opera from 1740.
• To relieve boredom, the 19-year-old Prince of Wales played leap frog in the corridors of New York's now-lost Fifth Avenue Hotel in 1860.
• Image: British issue proclamation encouraging slaves to run away from American masters, April, 1814.
• From Little Fanny to Fluffy Ruffles: the scrappy history of paper dolls.
• A now-famous April Fools blog from the British Library features a Unicorn Cookbook.
• Elizabeth of York, the first Tudor Queen of England.
• The magnificent letterhead of "Mademoiselle Paula, The Famous Reptile Conquerer," 1899.
• Image: "Clara Bow is in my driveway. She's yelling something about baseball starting today."
• "False pregnancies" in 18th c. France.
• A visit to the 1849 lighthouse on Execution Rock near Port Washington, NY.
• About sixty paintings of 1600s families.
• Barmy baking: 18th c. recipe for Plain Cakes, or Barm Brack.
• "His spread-eagle collars kept New Yorkers agog": the Gilded Age socialite dubbed the "King of the Dudes."
• Image: Sometimes an obelisk is just an obelisk; this is clearly not one of those times.
• A medieval historian compares the women of Game of Thrones to the real deal.
• Punished for being poor: London's forgotten workhouses.
• On April 4, 1581, Sir Francis Drake threw a very special banquet.
• The exciting history and origin of the cocktail umbrella.
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