• Victorian fat-shaming: harsh words on weight from the 19thc.
• How the stethoscope transformed medicine 200 years ago.
• Those kids of 1818, staring mindlessly into their glass devices: the now-forgotten craze for kaleidoscopes.
• The floating pleasure worlds of Paris and Edo in art.
• Jane Austen's music collection is now digitized and available on line.
• Image: Timeless beauty: a German gaming pouch, c1675-1700.
• Carved skeletons, Elizabethan theater giants, and a cat: St Leonard's, Shoreditch, London.
• Eleanor Sidgwick, the original Victorian female ghostbuster.
• Spectators pictured "fanning" the flames of early baseball passion.
• A history of embarrassing presidential campaign logos.
• Image: Celebrate summer's lushness with this green brocade robe a la francaise, c1740s.
• In 1704, Isaac Newton predicted the world will end in 2060.
• Willa B. Brown, the first African American woman to earn a commercial pilot's license in 1937.
• Ghosts in the machine: the devices and daring mediums that spoke for the dead.
• Discovery of vast treasure-trove of fine textiles shows importance of fashion to Bronze Age Britons.
• The history of exhaustion.
• Image: "Is this you five years from now?" Advertisement selling cigarettes to women as a diet aid, 1920s.
• The art of cuisine: dining with the artist Toulouse-Lautrec and his wildly impractical but fascinating cookbook.
• Working in the Paris fashion industry 100 years ago.
• Analysis of an athlete's weight, pains, digestion, perspiration levels, and speed - in 1813.
• A now-lost 1820s house in New York once known as the "house of romance."
• Thomson's Guide to London, 1902.
• Seventeenth century doll houses weren't invented for children's play, but to show off wealth and teach domestic roles.
• Just for fun: Test your book smarts.
Hungry for more? Follow us on Twitter @2nerdyhistgirls for fresh updates daily.
Above: At Breakfast by Laurits Andersen Ring. Private collection.
One of us -- 
3 comments:
I still have my kaleidoscope.
Quite true that the stethoscope enabled better clinical diagnosis from 1816 on. But the reason the stethoscope went from "wooden and rigid" to "rubber and flexible" was different. The young graduates, who finished Medicine in 1970 and started their first year of residency in hospitals, had a Sexy Stethoscope Competition. Which was sexier - hanging straight down? doubled over and wrapped behind the neck? with the chest piece tucked away in the top pocket?
My husband and his friends, aged 23 in 1970, swear this was true :)
I've just found your blog recently, and it's great - such a lot of interesting things here.
Will you ever consider a podcast or vlog? I reckon you'd be tremendous.
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