Breakfast Links: Week of December 1, 2014

The best weekend reading for you – our weekly round-up of fav links to other blogs, web sites, articles, and images, all gathered via Twitter.
• You go, Louisa May Alcott! Royalties from her books were far higher than those of Henry James and Herman Melville - and many writers today.
• Guide to old Hollywood special effects - with GIFS.
• 1920s college kids and the raccoon coat craze.
• Ladies last: eight important inventions by women that men got credit for.
• Image: Postcard, 1920s: Judge a flapper's appetite by her size
• Circulating libraries in Jane Austen's England.
• New book reveals that real Little House on the Prairie was closer to Deadwood than we'd like to believe.
• Blurred forms: an unsteady history of drunkenness.
• Which of course leads to this: how do you cure a historic hangover?
• Image: Hand-sewn, block-printed wool dress, c. 1848.
• You better watch out! Krampus is coming for children who've been bad.
• Edward Rushton, blind 18th c. poet and slavery abolitionist.
• Trowelblazers: early female geologists.
• For the knitters: vintage knitting pattern to download for a 1940s "Victory Jumper."
• "The dose makes the poison": dangerous 18th c. plants.
• Image: Detail of stunning 1920s embroidered coat.
• How bread is tied up with the origins of "lord" and "lady."
• Lovely photographs of winter light in Spitalfields, London.
• Great 1956 interview with writer Dorothy Parker.
• A shoe-lovers dream: newly rediscovered family shoe store locked up unchanged for decades.
• The Apian Emperor: Napoleon and bees.
• Image: The medieval palace in The Tower of London shows how colorful castles could be.
• The most heated, passionate, and intense letters of love, lust, and anger ever written.
• Peter Stuyvesant's eight rules for drinking responsibly in 17th c. New Amsterdam.
• How to be decorative while ice skating, 1917.
• The 1712 house and gardens at Badminton of the Duke of Beaufort.
• Three rare 1850s-60s daguerreotypes of elegantly dressed African-Americans.
• Eleanor of Castile, 13th c. queen of England.
• Image: Wind-swept frost in the Beskydy Mountains.
• Popular and socially acceptable in 18th c. America: cockfighting.
• "All ayre and fire": the life of Elizabethan playwright Christopher Marlowe.
• Was the 17th c. the real century of the décolleté?
• Art historian spots a long-lost Hungarian masterpiece being used as a set-prop in Stuart Little.
• On the trail of the Plantagenets, Britain's bloodiest dynasty.
• Image: Trevithick's Railway and Locomotive, 1808.
• Love, flowers, and diamonds come together in the perfect sentimental 18th c. ring.
• Please adjust your dress: a fine Victorian urinal.
• After eight weeks of questioning, an anarchist jumps from an NYC skyscraper in 1920. Or did he?
• "Thy touch alone unbounds the chains of slavery": an unusual grave in the Lake District.
• What was the 18th c. going rate for selling your wife?
• Image: The gymnasticon, late 18th c. exercise machine invented by Francis Lowndes.
• Icy blue silk and feathers: two luxurious winter garments from 1870s-80s.
• What happened to England's abandoned mansions?
• Because there's a museum for everything: the online Moist Towelette Museum.
• Image: That moment when you storm the castle and realize you only brought one sword.
• Just for fun: Marutaro the hedgehog plays jazz piano.
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