Breakfast Links: Week of March 2, 2015

Fresh for your weekend reading - our weekly round-up of fav links to other blogs, web sites, articles, and images, gathered for you via twitter.
• Some strikingly modern faces in this collection of Victorian cartes de viste.
• The gorgeous typeface that drove men mad and sparked a hundred-year-old mystery.
• Don't spare the rum: 18th c. summer punch recipe for fortifying gentlemen in South Carolina.
• A glimpse into the not-so-secret diary of two-year-old Victor Cavendish, late 9th Duke of Devonshire.
• How to invent palindromes.
• Early 20th c. posters that warned of the horrors of a world with women's rights.
• Here piggy, piggy: George Washington's hogs at Mount Vernon.
• Beware the fish mousse: how all the food on Downton Abbey gets made.
• Image: Elegant, finely crafted Balmoral boot, c. 1900-1910.
• Mary Driscoll, the "matchgirl" who fought for workers' rights.
• Smugglers, spies, and privateers: the Isle of Jersey during the Napoleonic Wars.
• Zounds, how you scrape! Being shaved in Georgian Britain.
• Ravages of war: what a spruce British soldier would have looked like at the beginning of the American Revolution, and what he looked like at the end.
• When Anton Mesmer arrived in Paris in 1778, women rushed to his house to be put under his spell.
• First lady Louisa Adams, social charmer.
• Retro fails: ten unhealthy advertising campaigns - and a hoax or two - from (thankfully) times gone by.
• Mrs. Sarah Siddons, the greatest tragic actress of the Georgian stage.
• Image: Red and gold glamour: embroidered coat from 19th c. Turkey.
• The tragic and heart-breaking history of Victorian "murder bottles" for children.
• Unfinished portrait of Wellington by Lawrence to be shown for the first time.
• The sham ghosts of the Georgian era.
• "My servants really live like kings & queens": below stairs intruding on above stairs, 1774.
• Image: London poster from WWI admonishing women against extravagance in dress.
• Magnificent 16th c. pendant of a swan, whose body is a single baroque pearl.
• Royal reputations rise and fall, but King John's deserves to remain at the bottom as England's worst king.
• Treadmills for prisoners, 1823.
• Image: 18th c. French box for storing wigs.
• Seventeenth century widow Lydia Scottow's wardrobe as described in her estate accounts.
• An 18th c. boxing match between two women for the hand of a farm lad.
• Which of these foods were available in 15th c. England?
• The ancient Greeks lived in a world of limited colors: black, white, metallic, with flashes of red or yellow.
• The fur trade in North America: observations of an 18th c. traveller.
• Image: Medieval London in a manuscript, c. 1500.
• War of the Roses skeletons, possibly of executed soldiers, unearthed in York.
• A tragic catalogue of a hundred mostly-miserable 19th c. marriages.
• Just for fun: the Mean Girls of Wolf Hall.
• More just for fun, or perhaps a SERIOUS WARNING: the dangers of reading romance novels, 1858.
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