Breakfast Links: Week of July 6, 2015

• Fashion and consumption during the first World War: fascinating on-line exhibition.
• A complicated case of 18thc. bigamy.
• A pair of portraits of Waterloo veteran Sir Richard Hussey Vivian - and the very different statements they make.
• An incredible American genre: "Lost Friends" ads published by ex-slaves searching for families and friends.
• Image: Marie-Antoinette's private library at the Petit Trianon at Versailles.
• Remembrance of things lost: are we forgetting the important things of our personal pasts?
• When science and fiction collided: the great moon hoax of 1835.
• "Prick't by Benedictus": blessed thistle and Much Ado About Nothing.
• What are under-servants offices in an 18th-19thc. household?
• Image: Sir Briggs, horse of Lord Tredegar of the 17th Lancers, ridden at Balaklava, 1854; Briggs survived the Charge of the Light Brigade & was unofficially knighted for his bravery.
• Bringing Thomas Jefferson's battered tombstone back to life.
• Creepy caves: the mystery of Mortimer's Tunnel.
• An unusual source for fashion history: church monuments.
• London Particular: how a fog named after a soup became a soup named after a fog.
• Image: Rotten Row in the 1890s.
• The revolution has been digitized: explore the oldest archive of radical posters relating to labor, civil liberites, feminism, anarchism, and other political movements.
• Nineteenth century dog names.
• A unique embroidered folding fan, 1590-1630.
• Amasa Delano, the Tryal, and the problem of racism in the early American Republic.
• How the first gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole, came to be in 1764.
• Alexander Burnes: diplomat, spy, charmer, deceiver.
• Splendid resource: an online historical thesaurus.
• Image: Now this is a book cover!
• Photographing the real bodies of incorrupt saints.
• The original Tiffany & Co. factory in NYC, an 1864 brick building on Prince Street that still survives.
• How a desert snail spent years in the 19thc. glued to a specimen card in the British Museum before anyone realized it was still alive.
• Image: Because Victorian children's books never tired of the notion of incinerating their target audience.
• Vita Sackville-West's erotic poetry to her lover emerges after an "intoxicating night."
• American girls in early 20thc. cigarette cards.
• Inside the remains of the 14thc. Charnel House, the oldest building in Spitalfields, London.
• "I am afraid you must stop writing these little love letters to my husband while he and I live together": Literary treasures from the Harry Ransom Center, TX.
• Image: Just for fun: who writes novels?
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Above: At Breakfast by Laurits Andersen Ring. Private collection.