Breakfast Links: Week of December 1, 2014

The best weekend reading for you – our weekly round-up of fav links to other blogs, web sites, articles, and images, all gathered via Twitter.
• You go, Louisa May Alcott! Royalties from her books were far higher than those of Henry James and Herman Melville - and many writers today.
• Guide to old Hollywood special effects - with GIFS.
• 1920s college kids and the raccoon coat craze.
• Ladies last: eight important inventions by women that men got credit for.
• Image: Postcard, 1920s: Judge a flapper's appetite by her size
• Circulating libraries in Jane Austen's England.
• New book reveals that real Little House on the Prairie was closer to Deadwood than we'd like to believe.
• Blurred forms: an unsteady history of drunkenness.
• Which of course leads to this: how do you cure a historic hangover?
• Image: Hand-sewn, block-printed wool dress, c. 1848.
• You better watch out! Krampus is coming for children who've been bad.
• Edward Rushton, blind 18th c. poet and slavery abolitionist.
• Trowelblazers: early female geologists.
• For the knitters: vintage knitting pattern to download for a 1940s "Victory Jumper."
• "The dose makes the poison": dangerous 18th c. plants.
• Image: Detail of stunning 1920s embroidered coat.
• How bread is tied up with the origins of "lord" and "lady."
• Lovely photographs of winter light in Spitalfields, London.
• Great 1956 interview with writer Dorothy Parker.
• A shoe-lovers dream: newly rediscovered family shoe store locked up unchanged for decades.
• The Apian Emperor: Napoleon and bees.
• Image: The medieval palace in The Tower of London shows how colorful castles could be.
• The most heated, passionate, and intense letters of love, lust, and anger ever written.
• Peter Stuyvesant's eight rules for drinking responsibly in 17th c. New Amsterdam.
• How to be decorative while ice skating, 1917.
• The 1712 house and gardens at Badminton of the Duke of Beaufort.
• Three rare 1850s-60s daguerreotypes of elegantly dressed African-Americans.
• Eleanor of Castile, 13th c. queen of England.
• Image: Wind-swept frost in the Beskydy Mountains.
• Popular and socially acceptable in 18th c. America: cockfighting.
• "All ayre and fire": the life of Elizabethan playwright Christopher Marlowe.
• Was the 17th c. the real century of the décolleté?
• Art historian spots a long-lost Hungarian masterpiece being used as a set-prop in Stuart Little.
• On the trail of the Plantagenets, Britain's bloodiest dynasty.
• Image: Trevithick's Railway and Locomotive, 1808.
• Love, flowers, and diamonds come together in the perfect sentimental 18th c. ring.
• Please adjust your dress: a fine Victorian urinal.
• After eight weeks of questioning, an anarchist jumps from an NYC skyscraper in 1920. Or did he?
• "Thy touch alone unbounds the chains of slavery": an unusual grave in the Lake District.
• What was the 18th c. going rate for selling your wife?
• Image: The gymnasticon, late 18th c. exercise machine invented by Francis Lowndes.
• Icy blue silk and feathers: two luxurious winter garments from 1870s-80s.
• What happened to England's abandoned mansions?
• Because there's a museum for everything: the online Moist Towelette Museum.
• Image: That moment when you storm the castle and realize you only brought one sword.
• Just for fun: Marutaro the hedgehog plays jazz piano.
Hungry for more? Follow us on Twitter @2nerdyhistgirls for fresh updates daily.

Friday Video: Too Late to Apologize, c.1776

Isabella reporting,

We shared this video back in the early days of the blog, and it's good enough to deserve another run now. The clip (from the North Carolina-based web educators Soomo Publishing) offers an entertaining mash-up of the American Founding Fathers with One Republic's Apologize –– and although it's full of important historical facts, it's also bound to stick in your head just as tenaciously as the original hit song did.

But if you'd prefer to see how culturally low you can go with American history, here's a Bud Light commercial that was recently produced for Independence Day, with the Founding Fathers whooping it up with plenty of brew and hot historical babes. Party on!

George Cruikshank envisions a nightmare

Cruikshank's Nightmare

Loretta reports:

Readers of this blog will by now be aware of the 2NHG’ fondness for the illustrators and caricaturists of the 18th and 19th centuries.  One of my absolute favorites is George Cruikshank, who was, fortunately, extremely prolific.

While the great painters focused on important people and sites, these tend to be formal and flattering.  Caricaturists and illustrators, however, dealt with everyday life, not always pretty. His images often help me envision scenes for my stories.

As well as creating distinctive images of people in their various humors and characters, Cruikshank drew and painted the details of his world, its streets and ordinary interiors.  But he had a talent as well for creating visual metaphors for human physical and emotional trials: headache, indigestion, and jealousy, for instance.

This image for a nightmare took my fancy, because it so aptly captures the experience in a way I think we can still relate to.

I was delighted to find Cruikshank’s A Comic Alphabet online at the Cincinnati library’s virtual library. 

You can also see the book at Spitalfields Life, a site I often turn to for big, sharp pictures of bygone London.

 Image courtesy the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County.

Clicking on the image will enlarge it.  Clicking on the caption will allow you to read at the source, where you can learn more and enlarge images as needed.

The Revolutionary Smile of Mme. Vigée-LeBrun, 1786

Isabella reporting,

"Smile!"

It's a simple, single-word command, one that's launched countless photo shoots and selfies. Smile, and the world smiles with you. In modern America, straight, white teeth are considered the sure ticket to success in every aspect of life, with a smile to lead the way.

It wasn't always so. In the past, limited diets and primitive dental hygiene made decay and missing teeth commonplace. A wide, toothy smile in an adult was considered vulgar and ill-bred, even a sign of wantonness or madness. Ladies and gentleman smiled with their lips together, hiding their teeth. Few Western portraits show a smiling subject, and rarer still are smiles with teeth.

But by the end of the 18th c., this was slowly beginning to change. As in so many things, Paris led the way, becoming the leader in producing toothbrushes, tooth-powders, mouth deodorants, and porcelain false teeth. Yet in 1787, when artist Élisabeth-Louise Vigée-LeBrun exhibited the charming self-portrait with her daughter, above, the polite world was shocked. Why? Because she had painted herself with a smile that showed her teeth.

The Mémoires secrets, a popular gossip-sheet, noted that "An affectation which artists, art lovers, and persons of taste have been united in condemning, and which finds no precedent among the ancients, is that in smiling, [Mme. Vigée-LeBrun] shows her teeth....This affectation is particularly out of place in a mother."

Mme. Vigée-LeBrun did not agree. She was a popular artist in court circles, and the favorite portraitist of Queen Marie-Antoinette. She had an attractive smile herself (or at least she painted it that way), and she must have believed that a happy smile was entirely appropriate for a mother and child, and for a successful artist as well. She painted herself several more times with her teeth showing - the self-portrait, right, dates from 1787 – and today these portraits seem modern and fresh because of those revolutionary smiles.

Above left: Mme. Vigée-LeBrun et sa fille, Jeanne-Lucie, dite Julie, by Élisabeth-Louise Vigée-LeBrun, 1786, The Louvre.
Below right: Self-Portrait, by Élisabeth-Louise Vigée-LeBrun, 1787, Fyvie Castle, Scotland.

Fashions for December 1829

Fashions 1829 December

Loretta reports:

The early 19th century La Belle Assemblée aka The Court Magazine has often contributed fashion plates to this blog.  The World of Fashion and Continental Feuilletons, which provided this month's, is another of John Bell’s publications for women. 

Unlike La Belle Assemblée, the World of Fashion offers four sets of fashion plates each month, each containing at least two dresses as well as head wear and coiffures.  This plate, I thought, gives us a wonderful sense of the wild hair/hat concoctions Lord of Scoundrels’ hero found so hilarious.

Fashion description

Fashion description

  Clicking on the image will enlarge it.  Clicking on the caption will allow you to read at the source, where you can learn more and enlarge images as needed.