• Previously unseen letter by Jane Austen set to be sold at auction.
• "Love's oven is warm": baking Emily Dickinson's bread recipe.
• The lost Gillender Builing - an 1896 Wall Street skyscraper, just 25 feet wide, is demolished only twelve years after construction.
• Image: Little red riding boots worn by an 8-year-old Victorian equestrian.
• Ann of Denmark, queen of 17th c. style.
• Wapping Stairs: the waterfront staircases of the Thames.
• Setting the record straight on who really introduced the Christmas tree to Britain (and it wasn't Prince Albert.)
• Winterthur buys a rare sampler worked in 1793 8-year-old Mary D'Silva, a student at Philadelphia's Bray Association Negro School.
• "Somewhat spent in drink": women in 17th c. alehouses.
• Gallery showing the work of Christina Broom, the UK's first female press photographer.
• Image: A public library's rules for patrons, 1930.
• An 18th c. miscellany of Christmas puddings, pies, and cakes.
• Whiskey, gin, and violent rocking: things which are bad for babies, 1924.
• Cheek rewarded: the (probably apocryphal) tale of Dean Swift and the post boy.
• What 19th c. New Englanders said about snow.
• Image: Empress Maria Fyodorovna's court dress of lilac pink velvet and silver thread, c.1870.
• Jane Reeve of Leadenham Hall: a sad early 19th c. tale of a young life cut short.
• Listen to this haunting, traditional Polish begging song, recorded in New York in 1927.
• Medieval spam: the oldest advertisements for books.
• The tale of Elizabeth Smith (and her second husband's first wife's first husband), 1766.
• The importance of cotton in Henry David Thoreau's 19th c. Concord.
• Lots of gunpowder: celebrating Christmas in a fur traders' fort.
• "God has called your husband to the other shore": the sad letters that turned wives into Civil War widows.
• Image: An irate husband writes to the editor of the Lady's Magazine in 1791 to complain.
• The 15th c. Norwich Guildhall, one of Britain's surviving medieval civic buildings.
• Fashion with a message: narrative cycles and Biblical references frequently appear embroidered on 18th c. gentlemen's waistcoats.
• "There was an old woman who lived in a shoe....": a most unusual 1860s artifact inspired by the rhyme.
• Indigo, pomegranate rind, turmeric: the vegetable dyes of Indian export textiles.
• What cities would look like at night if lit only by the stars.
• Image: Female road sweepers cleaning the streets of Liverpool while the men are away fighting, March, 1916.
• A brief history of the holiday Wassail.
• Striking photos of a medieval bridge - and river - buried beneath the streets of modern Rochdale.
• How historical dress inspired the costume designer of the animated Frozen.
• Why did Charles Dickens have a personal post box?
• Mourning portraits: an expression of grief in the Georgian era.
• Harder than you'd think: entertaining quiz to identify whether a quote is by Shakespeare or Lady Gaga.
• Even the great poets had to revise. Just ask William Wordsworth.
• Image: Just for fun (and our most popular RT of the week): Is this the most WTF book ever published?
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Re the female road sweepers in WW1. Female employment in previously male jobs was probably a feature in all wars, but in 2014 the subject has had a lot of coverage in history programmes on tv and in magazines. I am sure the women were delighted to be doing their bit and earning a living, but how long did it last? Did the men take the jobs back, as soon as war was over? What happened to the women's employment after Dec 1918?
ReplyDeleteHels ~ This is not my time period, so I'm hoping someone else more knowledgeable will chime in. But it's my impression that the post WWI era was a time of great opportunity for women, largely for the grim reason that so many men had been killed during the war. Women continued in the jobs they'd taken during the war because the men who'd held them previously didn't return. Many women who would ordinarily have married now had to support themselves, and they, too, joined the work force. Anyone else out there want to contribute more?
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