Saturday, February 20, 2016

Breakfast Links: Week of February 15, 2016

Saturday, February 20, 2016
Breakfast Links are served - our weekly round-up of fav links to other web sites, articles, blogs, and images via Twitter.
• Touching love-letters from sailors at sea.
• Wonderful: The friendship book of Anne Wagner, compiled 1795-1834.
Street life in Victorian London, captured in photographs.
• History of a chair that probably belonged to John Hancock.
• The introduction of anesthesia: imagine surgery without it.
• Curious 18thc cats.
Image: The 1587 death warrant for Mary, Queen of Scotts, signed by Elizabeth I.
Parcels and boxes: 19thc textile shopping.
• A 1765 complaint about a wife eloping begins an investigation into an unhappy marriage.
• Not entirely accurate, but still interesting: the Belle Epoque body-con dresses that shocked early 20thc Paris.
• In the 15th-17thc, earwax was considered both versatile and useful.
• Thackeray's own original drawings for Vanity Fair reveal points not mentioned in the text.
• Who invented the first false eyelashes?
Image: Marie Antoinette's Green Library from Versailles.
• The problem with "always" and "never" in historical costuming (and really history in general.)
Courting and romance in the 18thc press.
• Forget the groundhog - according to Anglo-Saxon calendars, February 6 is the last day of winter.
• Five lovely letters on the pleasures of reading and the benefits of libraries.
Image: Word War One poster warning against spies.
• Was Charles Dickens the first celebrity medical spokesman?
• As "White Mouse", Nancy Wake was among the most decorated secret agents of the World War Two.
• The noisy Middle Ages.
• What do Thomas More, Hans Sloane, and a Moravian burial ground have in common?
Junk mail is nothing new, as these 19thc examples show.
• Did Martha Washington really have a tomcat named after Alexander Hamilton?
Image: Block and axe from the Tower of London that was also used as a child's chair in a Yeoman Warden's quarters!
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Above: At Breakfast by Laurits Andersen Ring. Private collection.

2 comments:

Hels said...

Every time I ask my doctor husband to review a book or write a guest post, he selects a medical topic. Vital history, to be sure!

Now I am finding that the post called Introduction of Anaesthesia is fascinating. Thank you.

Karen Anne said...

Those were the days, when the post office actually delivered mail even if the address required thought. I mailed a letter to a well-known organization in Providence a month or so ago, and it came back three weeks later stamped undeliverable because the last two digits in the zip code were wrong.

 
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