Breakfast Links: Week of March 21, 2016

Breakfast Links are served - our weekly round-up of fav links to other web sites, articles, blogs, and images via Twitter.
• Artist seeks to revive the lost craft of painted Tudor wall coverings.
• Never returning to normality: zoot suits, drape jackets, and bondage trousers.
• More than a musical instrument: a portable Irish harp, 1819.
• From fashion accessory to feather duster: the history of the ostrich feather trade in London.
• Followed by: fashion, feathers, and animal rights.
• Dracula and the Victorian politics of blood.
• Image: Birmingham's Victorian "Temple of Relief" is surprisingly elegant for a public urinal.
• Florence Nightingale saved lives with statistics and made data beautiful.
• French customs and manners as observed by an 18thc Scotsman.
• The unknown Roman girl buried beneath a London landmark.
• The global connections of 18thc Charleston, SC.
• Psychologists have studied writer's block - and they know how to beat it.
• Image: A luxurious gold box for storing hats or headdresses from 15thc Florence.
• A plea on behalf of immigrants, most likely written in Shakespeare's hand.
• An international incident in 1839: an unsigned treaty and a slave ship from Duxbury, MA.
• Here be dragons - and battleships. In the middle of Manhattan, 1917.
• Touching the past: why history is important.
• Seven strange facts about early American funerals.
• Image: Spinning op art mosaic floor with Medusa at the center, from 115-150AD.
• Fighting in plain sight: women soldiers of the American Civil War.
• Would you buy a used car from William Shakespeare? How about mustard?
• Picking locks and foreign plots: ciphers in British Library manuscripts.
• Just for fun: Quiz to determine what your profession would have been in Victorian England.
Hungry for more? Follow us on Twitter @2nerdyhistgirls for fresh updates daily.
Above: At Breakfast by Laurits Andersen Ring. Private collection.