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.
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Above: At Breakfast by Laurits Andersen Ring. Private collection.