Bonus Breakfast Links: Week of December 3, 2018

A bonus round of Breakfast Links! Our weekly round-up of favorite links to other web sites, articles, blogs, and images via Twitter.
• Isabella Banks, "Orator" Hunt, and the Peterloo Massacre.
• In Ireland, making lace for the love of it.
• A brother's detailed guide for his sister on how to tie a new bonnet, 1830.
• A different kind of "ghost writing" from the Victorian era - and one that permitted men to take all the credit: W.B.Yeats and his "spirit-medium."
• The British royal Christmas list from 1750 included a "large Barril" (?) and a fencing master.
• Image: Low 18thc chair of Agnes Burns, with short legs to accommodate household labor such as cooking, spinning, and nursing.
• A 1660s recipe for hot "chacolet" from Rebeckah Winche's receipt book.
• What if ordinary people made their own money? Billets de Confiance from the French Revolution.
• The secrets of newspaper names.
• That time when 18thc French aristocrats were obsessed with sexy face-stickers.
• The "detestable crime" in Regency Britain.
• Red silk tango boots from the 1920s.
• Image: This little prayer book is believed to contain the last words written by French Queen Marie-Antoinette on the day of her execution, October 16, 1793.
Above: At Breakfast by Laurits Andersen Ring. Private collection.

Breakfast Links: Week of December 3, 2018

Breakfast Links are served! Our weekly round-up of favorite links to other web sites, articles, blogs, and images via Twitter.
• A glossary of 18th and 19thc tea and tea terms.
• The man who named the Boston Tea Party (and much later than you think.)
• Masquerade balls in Regency London.
• Nineteenth century astronomer Ellen Harding Baker created this embroidered quilt of the solar system as a teaching tool for her students.
• Read the original The Wind in the Willows: the hand-written letters that author Kenneth Grahame wrote to his seven-year-old son Alastair in 1907 that evolved into the classic children's book.
• Image: The oldest intact European book was interred with St. Cuthbert in 698 and is bound in red goatskin.
• In old Marylebone.
• The cap as a modest necessity for 19thc women.
• The biggest fiction bestsellers of the last hundred years.
• Image: The Brontes wrote their novels and poetry at this dining table.
•"Tough as old boots": 500-year-old Thames skeleton discovered, still wearing his remarkably well-preserved leather boots.
• Dead men's teeth: a brief history of dentures.
• Neon lost and found: where New York City still burns bright.
• Image: 1920s tall aquamarine boots worn by actress and dancer Andree Spinelly.
• Beer and bullets: a brief history of beer in the American Civil War.
• Elaborate slippers, embroidered and embellished with beetle wings, that were given to the chaplain of the East India Company in 1726.
Hungry for more? Follow us on Twitter @2nerdyhistgirls for fresh updates daily.
Above: At Breakfast by Laurits Andersen Ring. Private collection.

Breakfast Links: Week of November 26, 2018

Breakfast Links are served! Our weekly round-up of favorite links to other web sites, articles, blogs, and images via Twitter.
• Guide dogs in medieval art and writing.
• The exceptional wedding shoes of Mary Wise Farley, 1764.
• The tangled history of weaving with spider-silk.
• Forget the movies: the original ghostbuster was 19thc scholar Eleanor Sidgewick.
• Wonderful personal memories of growing up in Jewish American Detroit: the fiddle and the city.
• Yes, they did it: bust enhancement in 19thc women's dresses.
• A breathtaking reconstruction 1,300-year-old Anglo-Saxon helmet from the Staffordshire Hoard.
• Self-taught poet Hester Pulter wondered in the 17thc "Why must I forever be confined?" - now her poems are online for all to see.
• A striking 1937 gold lame wedding outfit designed and stitched by the bride herself.
• Tanuki, the shape-shifting raccoon-dog: mischief, magic, and change in the Japanese countryside.
• A visit to the house of 18thc artist William Hogarth.
• The Statue of Liberty's original torch gets a new home.
• "Battalion of Life": American women's hospitals and the First World War.
• Contested rites: the fascinating roots of America's Thanksgiving holiday.
• Protecting children in traffic: a brief history of crossing guards.
• You may be cool, but you'll never be Cordell Jackson "the rockin' granny" cool.
Hungry for more? Follow us on Twitter @2nerdyhistgirls for fresh updates daily.
Above: At Breakfast by Laurits Andersen Ring. Private collection.

Breakfast Links: Week of November 12, 2018

Breakfast Links are served! Our weekly round-up of favorite links to other web sites, articles, blogs, and images via Twitter.
• Lost identity of 150-year-old body discovered in New York City discovered.
• Women at sea: Ann Johnson and Abbie Clifford.
• "The joy of my life": seeing-eye dogs, disabled veterans and civilians, and World War One.
• "A revolution in female manners": the political portraiture of Mary Wollstonecroft.
• "I'll glut you with gold": the strange ambivalence of the treasure map.
• Follow the thread for all the amazing images: the American Revolution as imagined in 1861 by a Japanese artist and author who had never left Japan.
• Ada Lovelace and her mother Annabella Byron: the Countess of Computing and the Princess of Parallelograms.
• A toy monkey that escaped Nazi Germany and reunited a family.
• Anna Morandi, the 18thc Italian anatomist and sculptor who brought dead bodies to light.
• Pyrotechnia: an Elizabethan fireworks guide includes how to make a firework dragon.
• The last velvet merchant in Venice.
• Archaeologists and medical historians discover how castration affected the skeleton of famed 18thc opera singer Farinelli.
• An up-market new suburb in late 17thc London: the development of St. James's.
• Child-stealing in Regency England.
• Nineteenth century Bostonian Harriot Kezia Hunt, an early practitioner of holistic medicine and staunch civil rights reformer.
• Don't try these at home: eight dishes made by notorious poisoners.
• Creeping (or creepy?) baby doll patent model, 1871.
• A c1870 silk dress with an ingenious built-in method for lifting the hem away from a dirty street (be sure to click on "additional images.")
• The Tenement Museum in NYC maps a century of deadly diseases and their human stories.
Hungry for more? Follow us on Twitter @2nerdyhistgirls for fresh updates daily.
Above: At Breakfast by Laurits Andersen Ring. Private collection.

Breakfast Links: Week of October 29, 2018

Breakfast Links are served! Our weekly round-up of favorite links to other web sites, articles, blogs, and images via Twitter.
• Does discovery of a red velvet bag reinforce the legend that Sir Walter Raleigh's widow Elizabeth kept his severed head with her after his execution?
• R is for raisins, the unexpected super-food found in many early modern medicines.
• Norah Smyth, suffragette photographer.
• Image: Cat passages in the doors at Thomas Jefferson's 18thc Monticello.
• The 19thc angel guides of death.
• Stylish (and prize-winning) 1959 dress, made from a feedsack.
• President George Washington's letter to the Hebrew congregation in Newport, RI, 1790.
• Image: Dubious tips on how to get a husband from an 1950s women's magazine.
• "Knackers pork": the grim reality of London slaughterhouses during the Regency.
• Elizabeth Thorn, the angel of the Battle of Gettysburg.
• Wheat the old way: 1940s video of Pennsylvania Dutch family harvesting wheat by hand, without modern machinery.
• From an 1930s trousseau: beautifully embroidered silk slip and tap pants.
• Image: 1850s child's leather boot decorated with a black cat.
• A Mandarin duck mysteriously appears on a pond in New York's Central Park.
• John Rogers and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow."
• The Kit-Kat Club, an 18thc literary, political, and social club that became a stronghold of the Whig party.
• Workers in a Goodwill store in New Jersey discover an important, original 1774 Philadelphia "rebel" newspaper.
• Fifteen important women in history that you may not have heard of.
Hungry for more? Follow us on Twitter @2nerdyhistgirls for fresh updates daily.
Above: At Breakfast by Laurits Andersen Ring. Private collection.
Please note: I'll be traveling this week, so alas, no Breakfast Links next Sunday....

Breakfast Links: Week of October 22, 2018

Breakfast Links are served! Our weekly round-up of favorite links to other web sites, articles, blogs, and images via Twitter.
• Madhouse genetics: what the archives of mental-health asylums reveal about the history of human heredity and he evolution of genetics.
• A very fancy 18thc tradecard for a less-than-fancy trade: a nightman is a disposer of human waste.
• Photo sleuths: How an American Civil War soldier's photograph with distinctive markings reveals the forgotten, invaluable work of the Dead Letter Office.
• Divining Mother Shipton, the 15thc Witch of York: propaganda and prophecy.
• Image: The wig of Princess Nany, with locks set with beeswax and a wreathe of lotus leaves, c1000BC.
• Frivolous spending, private parties, and grumpy governesses: the secret lives of the servants at Chatsworth, the country seat of the Dukes of Devonshire.
• The mighty effects of spiritous liquor displayed; or, 18thc cider was a temperance drink.
• Image: Dandy! Painter George Harvey looking dashing in his patterned dressing gown over waistcoat and trousers, c1840s, plus a similar surviving dressing gown.
• Beautiful and haunting photographs: tales from the valley that time forgot.
• The great big pumpkin fight: a late 19thc symbol of the growing divide between rural and urban American life.
• Victorian mourning jewels and how they were worn.
• Too many apples? Follow this 18thc recipe to make a marmalet of pippins.
• Image: Two child-sized armchairs with petit-point covers worked by Alice B. Tolkas from designs by Pablo Picasso.
• Bright 19thc embroidered braces: worked by wives, daughters, and sweethearts to help keep men's trousers in place.
• Where to find remnants of the glorious old Penn Station in New York City.
• An A-Z of Victorian novel deaths.
• Historic hauntings from Hampton Court palace.
• Saved by a giant turtle? A roadside marker program in the state of New York embraces the grey area between official history and local lore.
Hungry for more? Follow us on Twitter @2nerdyhistgirls for fresh updates daily.
Above: At Breakfast by Laurits Andersen Ring. Private collection.

Breakfast Links: Week of October 15, 2018

Breakfast Links are served! Our weekly round-up of favorite links to other web sites, articles, blogs, and images via Twitter.
• Rediscovering the black muses erased from art history.
• A Victorian guide to Cambridge student life.
• Mark Twain liked cats better than people.
• Star-spangled Pierrot and Pierrette costumes from the 1920s.
• How the Romantic poets idolized 18thc Polish freedom-fighter (and veteran of the American Revolution) Tadeusz Kosciuszko.
• Image: Lord Byron's carnival mask.
• The treatment of children in the Garlands Lunatic Asylum, 1862-1914.
• A medieval book that opens six different ways, revealing six different books in one.
• The 19thc British cavalry horse.
• Coach clocks, for telling time on long journeys.
• Infusing life: the first human-to-human blood transfusion, 1818
• Image: Macabre c1815 silver skull opens up to reveal 17thc watch.
• What happens when humans fall in love with an invasive species.
• Land of the Livingstons: historic houses along the Hudson River.
• Maureen Rose, buttonmaker, in a Fitzrovia shop that's in the house where Charles Dickens grew up.
• The royal babies of King George III and Queen Charlotte.
Hungry for more? Follow us on Twitter @2nerdyhistgirls for fresh updates daily.
Above: At Breakfast by Laurits Andersen Ring. Private collection.

Breakfast Links: Week of October 8, 2018

Breakfast Links are served! Our weekly round-up of favorite links to other web sites, articles, blogs, and images via Twitter.
• Enormous farm animals: the history behind an "absolute unit."
• Williams & Sowerby, silk mercers of Oxford Street who produced tissue de verre, or "glass cloth. More about tissue de verre here.
• Ectoplasm and Helen Duncan, the last British woman tried for witchcraft - in 1944.
• "I have heard some of the Democratic rejoicing": Abigail Adams' last letter to husband John, 1801.
• Image: Know Your Pugs, from Strand Magazine, 1892.
• An 1820s shooting coat, worn for hare-coursing.
• Dozens of costume history books to read on line via The Getty.
• The challenges of war to a woman: Baroness Frederika von Riedesel describes the second Battle of Saratoga,
1777.
• Image: Gorgeous diamond and emerald parure designed by Prince Albert for Queen Victoria.
• A 12thc relic meets 21stc technology.
• Frances Gabe and her amazing self-cleaning house.
• In the 1870s, a radical journalist and a photographer documented London street life with these images.
• Late 19thc silk Chinese woman's surcoat features flying cranes against mountains and clouds.
• Image: Unusual Georgian mourning brooch c1780 with hairwork tomb, weeping willow, and urn.
• Every Marine carries the flag: a brief history of the US Marine Corps flag.
• Little ladies: Victorian fashion dolls and the feminine ideal.
• The twenty-five most famous residents of New York City's cemeteries.
Hungry for more? Follow us on Twitter @2nerdyhistgirls for fresh updates daily.
Above: At Breakfast by Laurits Andersen Ring. Private collection.

Breakfast Links: Week of October 1, 2018

Breakfast Links are served! Our weekly round-up of favorite links to other web sites, articles, blogs, and images via Twitter.
• A specialized working horse in the 19th century: the funeral horse.
• What did 18thc ladies wear under a chemise a la reine?
•  A forgotten letter by early UK suffragette Annie Kenney is discovered.
• A mourning ring for Louis XVI, created to coincide with the reinstatement of Louis XVIII, represents not only grief, but a new nationalism.
• "Toss up, pitch and hustle, and any other games of chance": all were banned in 1775 by General Washington.
• When the wardrobe is (intentionally)  the star of the film: "Dressing a Renaissance Queen."
• Image: This renowned 18th thoroughbred was named "Potoooooooos" pronounced "Pot-eight-Os".
• Rediscovering Julia Rush, another unsung Founding Mother.
• Queen Victoria's Hindustani diary.
• A magnificent embroidered evening dress, c1798-1800.
• When fashion set sail: the truth about those miniature ships in 18thc French ladies' hair.
• "To Order Mushromes": a transcribed recipe to try from Jane Dawson's 17thc manuscript cookbook.
• Art nouveau meets baroque in Bristol.
• Image: "Outbursts of Autumn: Monstrous Muffs and Startling Stoles", 1910.
• Victorian advice for men on civility towards women.
• Hunt is on for a lost 18thc masterpiece (last seen in the 1940s) by Angelica Kauffman, one of the greatest women artists.
• How 19thc women in Edinburgh, Scotland helped enslaved Americans on the road to freedom.
• A grab-bag of historical styles, yet somehow it works: the eclectic, elegant 1887 Honeywell-Roberts house in Manhattan.
Hungry for more? Follow us on Twitter @2nerdyhistgirls for fresh updates daily.
Above: At Breakfast by Laurits Andersen Ring. Private collection.

Breakfast Links: Week of September 24, 2018

Breakfast Links are served! Our weekly round-up of favorite links to other web sites, articles, blogs, and images via Twitter.
• Following the fashions: a basic American pastime.
• Paintings of unruly 19thc children by Andre Henri Dargelas (1828-1906)
• The history of surgical gloves includes a love story.
• Every night, the U.S. Constitution is lowered into an atomic-bomb-proof vault to protect it from thieves and terrorists.
• Image: Skulls of medieval soldiers, fused with the chain mail they'd been wearing when they died.
• A 17thc sailor's shameful confession discovered in his journal - though there's a kind-of happy ending.
• Stylish woman's hat c1880 cleverly uses pleated silk trim to replicate the feathers (or wings) of endangered birds.
• Teeth whitening in the Victorian era, from charcoal paste to sulfuric acid.
• Image: Road-trip beauties posing with a car (and some canoe paddles) c1920.
• Samuel Pepys was a 17thc visitor: the Cheesecake House in Hyde Park.
• Newly digitized online: 1,600 pre-1900 books on astrology, magic, alchemy, and the occult.
• Exercise for women in the early 19thc.
• A serial killer on the island of Jamaica, 1773.
• Image: The 18thc Shell Cottage, Carton House, County Kildare.
• Founded in London in 1875: the Metropolitan Association for Befriending Young Servants.
• How the Rolling Stones in 1968 ended up at 17thc Swarkestone Pavilion.
• While Europe's oldest intact book was found in the coffin of a saint.
Hungry for more? Follow us on Twitter @2nerdyhistgirls for fresh updates daily.
Above: At Breakfast by Laurits Andersen Ring. Private collection.

Breakfast Links: Week of September 17, 2018

Breakfast Links are served! Our weekly round-up of favorite links to other web sites, articles, blogs, and images via Twitter.
• "Telling the bees": In 19thc New England, it was held to be essential to whisper to beehives of a loved one's death.
•Wynflaed and the price of fashion: a rare 11thc manuscript will describes one woman's wardrobe.
• Alexander Hamilton and the lacemaking industry of Ipswich, MA.
• Felix Nadar in the gondola of a balloon - and how this carte-de-viste was intended to help promote his costly ballooning ventures.
• Not for the shy: spectacular tartan Lord of the Isles suit worn by the Duke of Windsor.
• Image: Rose gathered between the trenches on the Western Front, 1918, and more on the 19-year-old soldier who sent it home to his sweetheart.
• Jane Austen's curious banking story makes her an apt face for the £10 note.
• Creole comforts and French connections: a case study in 18thc Caribbean dress.
• The 10thc teenaged English princess who defied a bishop over fashion.
• Ten vintage canes with amazing hidden features.
• Every picture tells a story - or does it? Examining two photos of romanticized train stations.
• A day in the life of a 19thc East India Company Director.
• The longest - and the shortest - reigns of the Middle Ages.
• Abraham Lincoln and the "sublime heroism" of British cotton workers.
• Old London landmarks: Fendall's Coffee House and Family Hotel.
• The story continues - much more about the Dido Elizabeth Belle portrait.
• The continuing power of literary relics: Shelley's ashes and Byron's hair.
• Rediscovering a missing evening dress worn by Queen Alexandra.
• Just for fun: the peekaboo cockatiel.
Hungry for more? Follow us on Twitter @2nerdyhistgirls for fresh updates daily.
Above: At Breakfast by Laurits Andersen Ring. Private collection.

Breakfast Links: Week of September 10, 2018

Breakfast Links are served! Our weekly round-up of favorite links to other web sites, articles, blogs, and images via Twitter.
• Why don't more boys read Little Women?
• Aretha Franklin, and the only hat that matters.
• Paths of glory: the road to lasting fame and fortune rarely runs straight.
• The Georgian Post Office played a major role in espionage,  doing what the Secret Services do today.
• Dreams and telepathy at the end of the American Civil War.
• An Indian chintz gown: fashion, status, and slavery in 18thc America.
• Image: An exquisite hairnet of gold, a superb example of a Hellenistic goldsmith's talent and skill, c200-150 BC.
• Coffee houses, taverns, tea, and chocolate in Restoration London.
• An extended family of stay-makers (corset-makers) living and working in 18thc London.
• Real estate history: when Trinity Church ruled lower Manhattan.
• Image: Silk damask gauze shoes from Chinese royalty that look surprisingly modern - yet are 800 years old.
• Imposters in history: sixteen famous con-artists and pretenders.
• Culture in the early American classroom: a failed attempt at assimilation.
• Fashion + competitive masculinity = the codpiece.
• Elizabeth Keckley: businesswoman, philanthropist, and dressmaker to a president's wife.
• Image: From these drawings, it's clear that 19thc artist Gericault had a very bite-y cat.
• The dipping and drinking wells of Hyde Park.
• Film star: a classic Baltimore movie palace shines again.
Hungry for more? Follow us on Twitter @2nerdyhistgirls for fresh updates daily.
Above: At Breakfast by Laurits Andersen Ring. Private collection.

Breakfast Links: Week of August 13, 2018

Breakfast Links are served! Our weekly round-up of favorite links to other web sites, articles, blogs, and images via Twitter.
• Dr. David Hosack, revolutionary nerd - and physician to both Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr.
• The skeleton suit: sounds scary, but not to the little boys who wore them in the early 19thc.
• "A Gentleman having married a wife made this request to her that she would not ride upon a great dog in the house": gossip from 17thc vicar John Ward.
• Eighteenth century business women and their trade cards.
• Mrs. Bridget "Biddy" Mason was brought to Los Angeles as a slave in 1851; she died free, and one of the city's wealthiest women.
• Image: The Marquis de Lafayette used pre-printed invitations for Monday night suppers; guests included Americans like Adams, Jay, and Jefferson visiting Paris.
• "Anyone can develop a good telephone personality": How to Make Friends By Telephone, a 1950 guide.
• In July, an 18thc white oak from Washington's era fell at Mount Vernon, but most of the stories surrounding the tree were from the Civil War.
• Image: John Adams drew this map of his local taverns in Braintree and Weymouth, MA, in 1760.
• The drowned, submerged prehistoric forests of Lincolnshire.
• Aunt Fanny's school bell, c1920.
• Old Bet, the first elephant brought to America, arrived in Newburyport, MA in 1797.
• Influenced by the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, workhouses built in 19thc England were designed to split up families by putting them in different laboring groups.
• The deadly 1911 heatwave that drove people insane.
• Image: Mona Friedlander and Joan Hughes, the first women to fly military planes in Britain, 1940.
• Julia Child's recipe for a thoroughly modern marriage.
• Benjamin Franklin discovers tofu for America.
• Six historic sites in Britain that survive from the Age of Steam.
• Image: Cat paw-prints preserved in medieval tiles.
Hungry for more? Follow us on Twitter @2nerdyhistgirls for fresh updates daily.
Above: At Breakfast by Laurits Andersen Ring. Private collection.

Breakfast Links: Week of August 6, 2018

Breakfast Links are served! Our weekly round-up of favorite links to other web sites, articles, blogs, and images via Twitter.
• Recreating the lace in a 17thc portrait of Lady Anne Clifford.
• The legendary French drummer boy Joseph Bara of the French Revolution.
• Lifting the lid on plants, poisons, and the power of color (plus how hard it is to kill the beetles needed to make cochineal.)
• Image: Wealthy visitors c1900 to seaside resort at Scarborough, Yorkshire, peer down at women gutting fish for their very hard livelihood.
• The persistence of sixteen-year-old Felicite Kina and her ability to negotiate Napoleonic law to maintain kinship ties.
• A 6thc Lombard warrior buried in northern Italy appears to have worn a knife as a prosthetic weapon in place of his amputated forearm.
• Ann Catley, the feisty diva.
• Image: Gorham Silver ice cream hatchet, c1880.
• The early 20thc pigeons that photographed the earth from above.
• The gravestone of poet John Keats: romancing the stone.
• Itching and scratching: 18thc flea traps.
• The creation of the new London docks in the early 19thc.
• Image: Tiny handmade book created in 1807 by 11-year-old Hannah Coffin.
• How an 18thc clergyman cured a sty on his eye by rubbing it with his tom cat's tail.
• What became of the wild ravens of London?
• William Corder and the Red Barn Murder, 1827.
• How incest became part of the Bronte family story.
• Video: A Roman signet ring is an amazing metal detector find.
Hungry for more? Follow us on Twitter @2nerdyhistgirls for fresh updates daily.
Above: At Breakfast by Laurits Andersen Ring. Private collection.

Breakfast Links: Week of July 30, 2018

Breakfast Links are served! Our weekly round-up of favorite links to other web sites, articles, blogs, and images via Twitter.
• Jane Austen and the Prince Regent: the very first purchase of an Austen novel.
• Charles Knowlton's Fruits of Philosophy; or, the Private Companion of Young Married People, 1832, the first popular manual on birth control and the first book on the subject by a physician.
• Gentle Annie Etheridge: no dainty lady on the Civil War battlefields.
• From billets-doux to swiping right: how the language of dating and courtship has evolved.
• Stunningly beautiful example of Shingle Style Architecture: the 1878 Eustis Estate.
• Image: Scorched by the current heatwave, the landscape surrounding Blenheim Palace reveals the ghostly outlines of the 1705 formal gardens.
• Child stealing in Regency England.
• How romanticized photographs and accounts of St Kilda produced a distorted idea of an idyllic Scottish lifestyle on the islands.
• Making the historical personal: reflections on pregnancy and birth.
• Image: An Italian parasol with beaded mermaids, c1800.
• An afternoon in Great Bardfield.
• Can reading make you happier?
• For workers at the Du Pont power mills, the fear of accidental explosions was constant; 228 people were killed at the mills between 1802-1921.
• Image: The wife of an officer killed at Waterloo had his remains boiled, and one of his vertebrae made into this memento mori box.
• When Golden Girls actress Bea Arthur was a Bernice Frankel, US Marine, and served in World War II.
• The 18thc paintings that inspired the costumes in the 2006 movie Marie Antoinette.
• Louise de Lorraine-Vaudemont, 16thc Queen of France.
• Why some 1880s-1920s gravestones are shaped like tree trunks.
Hungry for more? Follow us on Twitter @2nerdyhistgirls for fresh updates daily.
Above: At Breakfast by Laurits Andersen Ring. Private collection.

Breakfast Links: Week of July 23, 2018

Breakfast Links are served! Our weekly round-up of favorite links to other web sites, articles, blogs, and images via Twitter.
• "I am half agony, half hope": Did you know that Jane Austen considered a different ending for Persuasion?
• Singerie: 18thc art depicting monkeys "aping" human behavior.
• Elizabeth Gould, 19thc natural history artist who traveled to Australia to execute thousands of exquisite paintings of Australian birds for her husband's publication.
• The history of that striped Breton knit shirt you've been wearing all summer.
• Faustina, Marquesa de Amboage: the ideal woman of 1899.
• Before the bookmobile: when librarians rode on horseback to deliver books to rural Americans during the Great Depression.
• Mother Goose as a Suffragette: a 1912 book of suffragette poems, digitized to read online.
• "Talking corpses": even in death, women's testimony was considered less creditable than men's.
• Puritan history-myths from the 17thc: did Oliver Cromwell ban mince pies?
• Image: Lovely Winterhalter painting of the linked hands of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert.
• The mysterious death of Captain Archibald Anderson.
• The colorful, historical vocabulary of beer.
• These are the world's oldest known surviving pants, dating from the thirteenth to eleventh century BC.
• It was a dark and stormy night: the strange story of "Shelley's Ghost."
• Make your own cockatrice - a terrifying animal hybrid!
• The radioactive wardrobe of Marie Curie.
• A 19thc children's picture book - in a can.
• The roots of the Hawaiian aloha shirt.
• Just for fun: Charlotte Brontë goes to yoga.
Hungry for more? Follow us on Twitter @2nerdyhistgirls for fresh updates daily.
Above: At Breakfast by Laurits Andersen Ring. Private collection.

Breakfast Links: Week of July 16, 2018

Breakfast Links are served! Our weekly round-up of favorite links to other web sites, articles, blogs, and images via Twitter.
• Literary dreams: the 1903 Carnegie Library in Elwood, IN is for sale.
• An account of Peggy Jones, a Regency-era London mud-lark.
• In search of abandoned African-American cemeteries and the stories behind them.
• How two hundred stitches in time saved the lining of an 18thc banyan.
• The last summer of White Court, President Calvin Coolidge's summer White House.
• Video: Cozy accommodations for the most miniature of miniature books in the Newberry Library.
• Has supper always meant dinner?
• Beautiful sky blue 1870s silk faille dress, made in Paris.
• How Abigail Adams and Thomas Jefferson became friends - and what finally destroyed the friendship.
• The funeral of Elizabeth Valois, Queen of Spain, 1568.
• Dangerous beauty: new exhibition looks at Medusa in Classical Art.
• The heatwave of 1808.
• The changing place-names of Washington, DC.
• Earl Grey tea: a splendid cup of tea with a tasty tale of creation.
• Why NYC needs a tribute to Nellie Bly, 19thc travel writer and journalist, and the original "fearless girl."
• What beds were like in 1776.
• Who will save this old 1840s stone schoolhouse, originally built and given for the education of the children in Hackney?
• Favorite story-tweet of the week features a 95-year-old former firefighter.
Hungry for more? Follow us on Twitter @2nerdyhistgirls for fresh updates daily.
Above: At Breakfast by Laurits Andersen Ring. Private collection.

Breakfast Links: Week of July 9, 2018

Breakfast Links are served! Our weekly round-up of favorite links to other web sites, articles, blogs, and images via Twitter.
• The 1802 Summer Exhibition of the Royal Academy faced unexpected competition from the wax figures of Marie Tussaud.
• Gin shops in the Regency: the "blue ruin" before hipsters discovered it.
• When reading inspired women to change history.
• How 18th-19thc literary women like Mary Robinson and Elizabeth Barrett Browning embraced opiates.
• The accidental Pied Piper of cats in 1909 New York.
• Video: Rotating jeweled flowers on this 18thc clock (sound up!)
• The 1866 wedding fashions in the painting The Hesitant Fiancee by Auguste Toulmouche.
• The link between women, witchcraft, and stirring.
• Pearls for the bride: a magnificent 1830s pearl parure.
• Cimitero delle Fontanelle and the Neapolitan cult of the dead.
• Image: "Touch watch" owned by author Helen Keller.
• Napoleon's pleasure-loving sister Pauline Bonaparte.
• A short history of tennis fashions.
• When butter was a food group: food and freedom in World War Two.
• The eagle as the ideal ruler, from ancient times to the Founding Fathers.
• Image: An aerial view of Hyde Park Fair on the day of Queen Victoria's coronation, June 28, 1838.
• A recipe for an unusual - and very potent - 18thc cocktail: King Calli's Spruce Beer.
• A brief history of the American Pledge of Allegiance.
• Ruth Wakefield is the name and the place behind legendary chocolate chip Toll House Cookies.
• How to live like an 11thc prince.
Hungry for more? Follow us on Twitter @2nerdyhistgirls for fresh updates daily.
Above: At Breakfast by Laurits Andersen Ring. Private collection.

Breakfast Links: Week of June 18, 2018

Breakfast Links are served! Our weekly round-up of favorite links to other web sites, articles, blogs, and images via Twitter.
• Adelaide Hermann, 19thc Queen of Magic: she caught bullets with her bare hands, and made magic's glass ceiling disappear..
• The poignant, richly creative life of poet John Keats, evoked through a visit to his house.
• Jefferson's Monticello finally gives Sally Hemings her place in presidential history.
• A 17thc tailor tempted by dancing: a page in the life of John Dane.
• Image: Hidden in the inside cover of this book, a 19thc hand-written witticism that's still funny.
• How women "got married" long before gay marriage.
• A page worth exploring: Music of the American Civil War.
• A football match in 18thc Ireland.
• Once freed from enslavement, Moses Williams became a master silhouette artist in 18th-19thc Philadelphia.
• The surprising origin of the word morgue.
• How to spot a perfect fake: James Martin, the world's top art forgery detective.
• Sex, lies, and betrayal: did Wordsworth really betray Coleridge?
• The "romance" of Grace and Calvin Coolidge.
• Image: Twinkle toes: rhinestone-set shoe epitomizes fashion's taste for sparkle after Stock Market Crash of 1929.
• Not just in Boston: New York City's Patriots and the 1774 Tea Party.
• The workings of the Ladies' Aid Societies of the American Civil War.
• The history of the lead pencil.
• What the sailors ate on board Captain Cook's Resolution, 1775.
Hungry for more? Follow us on Twitter @2nerdyhistgirls for fresh updates daily.
Above: At Breakfast by Laurits Andersen Ring. Private collection.

Breakfast Links: Week of June 11, 2018

Breakfast Links are served! Our weekly round-up of fav links to other web sites, articles, blogs, and images via Twitter.
• A cup of tea, made the 18thc way.
• The rebozo: fashion, feminism, and death.
• Lily of Liberty: Amelia Bloomer at 200.
• Thomas Bewick's cat.
• Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea, 17thc poet - and perhaps a pre-Romantic?
• Face of a suffragette: previously unknown footage of Emily Wilding Davison discovered.
• Faith Trumbull: the artist was a young girl.
• Image: The Silver Streak Iron, c1946 may be the most beautiful iron ever made.
• Did 18thc heiress Mary Blandy poison her father's oatmeal?
• Rainbow-colored beasts from a 15thc Book of Hours.
• Murder on the Titanic: the nightmare one survivor from Rhode Island never forgot.
• Blue moons, honeymoons, and moons made of green cheese: lunar language.
• Early Modern memes: recycling and reusing 17thc woodcuts in popular print.
• Catching up on Beatnik fashion.
• Image: "The latest style of ladies' muff is provided with a pocket for the owner's pet dog" 1895.
• When Connecticut led the nation in the production of pins.
• An x-ray of a Civil War wound? A hapless re-enactor accidentally shot himself with an 1860s gun.
• Might we interest you in a dog-powered velocipede?
• Quick quiz: can you match these archaic names for animals with their modern names?
Hungry for more? Follow us on Twitter @2nerdyhistgirls for fresh updates daily.
Above: At Breakfast by Laurits Andersen Ring. Private collection.