Breakfast Links: Week of May 11, 2015

Ready for your weekend browsing pleasure - our weekly round-up of fav links to other blogs, web sites, articles, and images, collected via Twitter.
• Bearded hipsters, beware: denouncing excessive facial hair through history.
• The use of the saber in Napoleon's army.
• Known for his innovative, exotic, and shocking designs, Paul Poiret was an early self-proclaimed "King of Fashion."
• The remarkable 19thc. butter sculptures of Caroline S. Brooks.
• Image: Surprisingly beautiful 18thc. barber's apron.
• Seventy years ago, Queen (then Princess) Elizabeth secretly partied in the street with commoners during VE Day celebrations.
• How the 1834 novel Tylney Hall by Tom Hood is an everyday story of black people of Georgian Wanstead.
• Viking fashions rock the catwalk.
• Solving an art history mystery: identifying the 18thc. portrait of Solomon Brigden, carter, in the service of the 3rd Duke of Dorset.
• Has there ever been a women-only army?
• Wigging out: a 17thc. recipe for extracting earwigs from the ear.
• Image: Belle Gordon, Champion Lady Bag Puncher of the World, c. 1900
• Bounce, the devoted Great Dane of Alexander Pope, who not only served as the poet's literary muse, but saved his life as well.
• How taking Mom out for a Mother's Day brunch is a feminist tradition.
• Georgian concern: can drinking tea turn you into a whore?
• Image: Child's striped knitted sock from Roman Empire, 1800-2000 years old.
• From Milton to Keats: five Cockney poets.
• Retroactive erasure: the Black Madonnas of Europe.
• Visions inside the 19thc. Mughal harem: three memorable portraits.
• The remains of a Irish immigrant woman, murdered in Pennsylvania in 1832, finally identified  & begin the long trip home for burial.
• Image: Trade card from 1896 for Ajeeb, the Wonderful Chess Automaton.
• How informal ex-pat networks helped build early modern empires.
• The A,B,C's of slavery and abolition.
• How nylon stockings changed the world seventy-five years ago.
• New research into what makes the Highland identity.
• Image: 1880 census page proves that at least one child really did run away to join the circus.
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