Saturday, October 31, 2015

Breakfast Links: Week of October 26, 2015

Saturday, October 31, 2015
Time for Breakfast Links - our weekly round-up of fav links to other articles, images, blogs, and websites via Twitter.
Oscar Wilde's tenure as editor of a high-end woman's magazine.
• English fertility towns: was there really something in the water?
• Gossip girls: early tea parties and the sexist slang they inspired.
• New National Parks Service website allows you to tour Ellis Island through your computer.
• For sale: Edith Wharton's $16,500 baby rattle.
• The real story of witches in Salem, MA, 1692 to 2015: "tragedy to farce without the pause for history in between."
• How Pauline Bonaparte lived for pleasure.
Image: a lovely example of marbling in a 19thc. book.
• Ghosts are scary, disabled people are not: the troubling rise of the "haunted" asylum for entertainment.
• Changing image of American girlhood: scanned Girl Scout equipment catalogues, 1918-2015.
• The London beer flood of 1814.
• Benjamin Howell, a 19thc. confectioner who also sold patent medicines
• A young Nantucket woman paints autumn in 1797.
Image: the fashionable silhouette for 1900.
• Atmospheric photographs of 1930s London at night.
• A spider that tumbled into a paper press in 1650 can be seen today, embedded in a math book.
• A woman convicted and beheaded for witchcraft 300 years ago to get a retrial.
Ernest Hemingway, clutterbug: the stuff he left behind.
• Who was the mysterious female Agent 344, a Revolutionary War spy who has never been completely identified?
Erotic dreams and nightmares from antiquity to the present.
Image: WWI munitions workers - no medals for an extremely dangerous job.
• A medieval love letter (and eat your meat!)
• Running his stall and crying his wares: recording of a 1930s herbalist from Petticoat Lane, London.
Glastonbury Tor and the labyrinth of the soul.
• Witch houses.
• Just for (Halloween) fun: what if your favorite books were Halloween candy?
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Above: At Breakfast by Laurits Andersen Ring. Private collection.

5 comments:

Karen Anne said...

"Borghese commissioned a well-known statue of Pauline by the most famous Italian sculptor of the time, Antonio Canova. She decided to pose nude as Venus Victrix, thus appalling her husband. When someone asked whether she was not uncomfortable being naked before the artist, Pauline replied, “Ah, but there was a fire in the room.”"

That set off a mental chime - Marilyn Monroe? Mae West? saying something similar, but the web has not turned it up.

Isabella Bradford/Susan Holloway Scott said...

Karen Anne - While that quote could have been spoken by any of the three ladies - it's deliciously in character for all three - I've always heard it in connection with Pauline. Can never see the statue without thinking it, too. ;)

Unknown said...

It was Marilyn. When asked if she had anything on at all, she replied: "The radio".

Karen Anne said...

Exactly, Charles, now I remember.

Isabella Bradford/Susan Holloway Scott said...

Marilyn may have said a variation, too, but I think Pauline had her been by about 130 years or so. Great minds think alike....

 
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