Breakfast Links: Week of May 16, 2016

Breakfast Links are served - our weekly round-up of fav links to other web sites, articles, blogs, and images via Twitter.
• The Swan with Two Necks and other important London coaching inns in early 19thc London.
• The First Children who led sad lives.
• The hidden messages of colonial handwriting.
• The deadly pain medicine sold by skeletons.
• Image: A Victorian book called Pleasing Stories for Pleasant Children naturally begins with King Herod ::shudder::.
• "Novelties that Create Fun" c1920.
• "This faithful machine": the literary history of word processing.
• Who could marry whom - a matter of concern to the law.
• The insults that sparked duels in Alexander Hamilton's America.
• Who let the dogs out?
• Art history project replicates hair styles worn by Porch Maiden caryatids on the Athenian Acropolis.
• Eavesdropping on Weimar: the true story behind the bestseller & movie Grand Hotel.
• Couture copies in America.
• Image: An 18thc snapshot of the grim conditions for bound coal miners in Scotland who have escaped from their master.
• The worst epidemic in 18thc North America (and it's not what you think.)
• Workhouse diets: paucity or plenty? Part two here.
• An important part of the early slave trade, Narragansett Pacers were one of America's earliest and most reliable breeds of horses.
• The biggest cat painting in the world.
• Image: The severed head of Medusa stares out from this 1911 silver-gilt relief.
• Airships over London, in war and in peace.
• A conspiracy unraveled: the murder of Captain Joseph White, 1830.
• Isaac Newton and the apple: the story and the myth.
• Glorious watercolors of tulips, the favorite flower of the 17thc.
• Image: John Adams' "Miss Adorable" letter to Abigail, 1762.
• "Time me, gentlemen": Dr. Robert Liston, the fastest surgeon of the 19thc.
• The flattering tricks of 19thc portraiture.
• A visit to the blacksmith's shop at Gretna Green - an infamous Regency landmark.
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Above: At Breakfast by Laurits Andersen Ring. Private collection.