Breakfast Links: Week of December 14, 2015

Breakfast Links on Friday? Why not? Loretta and I are heading off on our annual holiday break from the blog and the rest of social media, but I couldn't go away without posting one more round of Breakfast Links. You're just getting them a bit early this week.
• What greed put asunder (a stunning 13thc. missal) scholarship can reunite.
• The untold story of the hairbrush.
• How Thomas Jefferson learned architecture.
• Piecing together the life of centenarian Mary Hicks (died 1870), who spent the last 27 years of her long life as an inmate in the Brentford Workhouse.
• Ten of England's most beautiful and historical synagogues.
• Image: Amazing photo of a woman cleaning casks for Tennents Brewery during World War One.
• The science of life and death in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.
• Exploring Hyde Park's hidden pet cemetery.
• Are longer words falling out of use because of texting and social media?
• Did you read this series? The Cherry Ames nurse books, published between 1943-1968.
• Dissecting the dream of the 1890s: A skype-date with those curious neo-Victorians.
• An American historian meets the American Girl dolls.
• Image: This unpicked 19thc bodice of 18thc silk brocade is equally stunning on the reverse side, where the weave creates a stripe.
• Clothes make the woman: a century of Chinese women and what they wore.
• Victorian adventures and terrible tales: the Illustrated Police News.
• The historical stories that make Revolutionary War researchers laugh.
• We can dream: some seriously amazing holiday party dresses from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
• The other Boleyn girl's daughter.
• A pair of stunning mid-19thc. papier mache bookbindings with mother of pearl here and here.
• A Georgian farting club.
• Did falsified medieval history help create feminism?
• The snowflake man from Vermont produced the first photographs of snowflakes in 1885.
• Image: Carbonized bread from Herculaneum, 79 CE.
• The poignant last letter of Mary Queen of Scots before her execution.
• Designer Jacqueline Durran's 11thc-style costumes for the latest film version of Macbeth.
• The Georgian circulating library.
• How an intern saved a museum by discovering this Revolutionary War treasure in the attic.
• Just for fun: cartoonish Kate Beaton draws the painter J.M.W.Turner and some of this artistic contemporaries.
Hungry for more? Follow us on Twitter @2nerdyhistgirls for fresh updates daily.
Above: At Breakfast by Laurits Andersen Ring. Private collection.