Breakfast Links: Week of October 31, 2016

Breakfast Links are served - our weekly round-up of fav links to other web sites, articles, blogs, and images via Twitter.
• A dress of Spitalfields silk.
• A place that harbors memory: the children's burial grounds in Mayo.
• Sure to ease voting concerns: 18thc recipe for Election Cake .
• Where did those pointy, black, "witch hats" come from?
• The divine messages of a Victorian spiritualist's drawings.
•  The Scottish play and the real Macbeth .
• Monkeys acting like humans in art.
• A woman's work: the market Narrative of Nancy Prince .
• Floating worlds: the letters (and envelopes) of Edward Gorey .
• Adelaide Knight , leader of the first east London suffragettes.
• Image: World War Two soldiers made clear grips for their pistols to display photos of their sweethearts.
• The problem with museum acquisitions ....
• Long-toppled statue of King George III to ride again, thanks to a Brooklyn studio.
• Thomas Edison's least successful invention was the Spirit Phone .
• Image: Never be lost: 17thc map-patterned court robes
• Mid-life crisis? John Adams contemplates his birthday.
• The mysterious and majestic stone circle at Lochbuie, on the Isle of Mull.
• The Green Book was an essential guide for 20thc black motorists.
• Image: Victorian-era embroidered slippers .
• The Empress Josephine and the French prophetess.
• The strange history of books bound in human skin .
• Discovering a Belle Epoque theatre inside a Parisian shoe store.
• Nelly Custis, George Washington's step-granddaughter, received many letters from the Lafayette family; explore them here .
• How Britain learned about bathrooms from the Ottoman Empire.
• Image: A whimsical book store sign in the Netherlands.
• Are book collectors really readers, or just cultural snobs?
• The story of 20thc Stepney sewing machinist Marie Iles.
• For all of you watching Poldark : the history behind the series.
• Video: A real-life race between a tortoise and a hare . Guess which one wins?
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Above: At Breakfast by Laurits Andersen Ring. Private collection.