Breakfast Links: Week of May 19, 2014

We're back from our work-hiatus with a fresh collection of breakfast links for you - links to our fav web sites, blogs, articles, & images from around the Twitterverse.
• Rare collection: daguerreotype class photos of Class of 1852, Amherst College.
• Handwritten note by Jane Austen "hidden" for 150 years on the back of a fragment of paper has been rediscovered.
• Self-control and the manly body, 1760-1860.
• Image: Female standard bearer, 15th c. Germany.
• Famous paintings photoshopped to today's beauty standards.
• Regency London's age of improvement: new streets, a park, a canal, docks, a railway, and omnibuses.
• Awkward early team photos.
• Chess will destroy your mind - or so Scientific American declared in 1859.
• Boss Tweed's brazen escape from a city jail.
• Wouldn't you love to receive a letter like this one decorated with green apples from Edouard Manet?
• Image: "Is College Bad for Girls?": cautionary pamphlet, 1905.
• Pineapples, guns, and wine: the forgotten heroine of the Battle of Louisburg, 1758.
• The rise and fall of Anne Boleyn, executed this week in 1536.
• The smelly snail: a 17th c. scent case.
• The gypsies of Georgian England.
• Reading in restraint: the last chained libraries.
• A modern family goes to war over Napoleon's nightshirt.
• How 18th c. pleasure gardens in New York City evolved from simple mead houses into extravagant entertainments.
• Image: Koreshan Annie Ray Andrews modeling a hat at Washington Park in Albany, NY, 1910.
• Who was Wellington's favorite niece?
• The Caribbean colony that brought down Scotland, c 1690.
• What did poor English boys wear in and out of prison, c 1840?
• Metropolitan Museum of Art initiative provides free access to over 400,000 digital images.
• Victorian technical education prepared young Englishmen being trained as engineers for careers in India.
• Image: Truly strange: a well-endowed Victorian "Science Fairy."
• A recipe for highly destructive Georgian sugar-plums.
• Leave your rings at home and don't fear repairs: 1909 advice for lady motorists in pictures.
• Eighteenth century trade cards on line: the Banks Collection, British Museum.
• Image: A pile of books by the bed taken to a whole new level.
• "Do you have any provisions for the road? I do not like my provisions": 10th c. Chinese/Khotanese phrasebook for Silk Road travelers.
• Queen Victoria's bookplate.
• An English country house transformed into an auxiliary hospital for wounded soldiers: Dunham Massey during World War One.
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