Breakfast Links: Week of July 27, 2015

Fresh for your browsing pleasure! Our weekly round-up of fav links to other web sites, blogs, images, and articles via Twitter.
• The story of Spitalfields silk.
• An early Victorian dress, inside and out.
• In elegant penmanship: a merchant's 1763 accounting book of the sales of African men, women, and children in Philadelphia.
• Photographer Eugene Atget captured the now-lost streets of old Paris about to be swept away.
• Flat roofs: 19thc. Italianate houses in upstate New York.
• Bodysnatching in 1816: a bad year to be alive, or dead.
• Image: One of Horace Walpole's "Gothic Lanthorns" from his house at Strawberry Hill.
• Seventeenth century women on horseback in art.
• The groaning Georgian dining table with the elaborate epergne at its center.
• Cracking open the history of fortune cookies.
• The Great New England Earthquake of 1663 came with a "roar like a great fire."
• Image: Mother of pearl fan, French, c.1895.
• Art and design meet in this "behind the seams" look at a 1918 dress by Lucile.
• The freaks and fascinations of 18thc. entertainment.
• Recreating 19thc. whitework embroidery.
• Who knew that Thomas Hughes, author of Tom Brown's School Days, also founded the idyllic town of Rugby, Tennessee, as a social experiment?
• The over-the-top coronation of George IV.
• Bigamy and bankruptcy: the unfortunate tale of 1750s Boston shopkeeper Henrietta Maria East Caine.
• Waiting for a summer promenade: eight of Britain's most historic surviving seaside piers.
• Image: Startling remedy for hiccups from an 18thc. herbal.
• "Have I been poisoned?" Real questions asked of an oracle by ancient Greeks.
• Women hunting, shooting, & fowling across the centuries in art.
• How to shop like a fashionable Regency gentleman.
• Image: A 19thc cartoon of "indoor cycling" complete with cinemetograph and fan.
• "A recipe for a Pomander": excerpts from a 17thc perfume book.
• All that flitters: spectacular sparkling wallpaper from 1910.
• Thought-provoking piece about how American slavery is presented on plantation tours.
• Image: Unabashedly unsubtle recruitment poster from WWI.
• Unfair sport: a brief history of Dickens-bashing.
• How Singer won the sewing machine war.
• Mass graves of Napoleon's soldiers recently found in Lithuania show that many died of disease and starvation, not battle.
• Manchester University launches largest-ever online collection of the work of Victorian author Elizabeth Gaskell.
• Image: Just for fun: In 1951, Harlequin Books wasn't just publishing romances.
Hungry for more? Follow us on Twitter @2nerdyhistgirls for fresh updates daily.
Above: At Breakfast by Laurits Andersen Ring. Private collection.