"...we should pass over all biographies of 'the good and the great,' while we search carefully the slight records of wretches who died in prison, in Bedlam, or upon the gallows."
~Edgar Allan Poe

Friday, June 23, 2023

Weekend Link Dump

 

"The Witches' Cove," Follower of Jan Mandijn

Welcome to the first Link Dump of Summer 2023!

Time to hit the beach!


A Christmastime unsolved mystery.

The site that went from penal colony to spaceport.

There are a whole lot of undiscovered shipwrecks out there.

Two French naval disasters.

A look at Leopold I of Belgium.

The woes of an English Renaissance feminist.

The oldest known Neanderthal engravings.

It's no surprise that the world's dirtiest man was killed by taking a bath.

A Brooklyn suffragette cat.

In search of the Orient Express.

The actor, the fascist, and the reincarnated queen.

An occurrence at Gill Creek.

A talented bookbinder goes bankrupt.  Such was life in Victorian London.

Bellamy's refreshment rooms, the establishment that kept British MPs fed.

The good old days when throwing hand grenades was a college sport.

It took some time for the media to notice the Wright brothers.

19th century fathers who poisoned their children.

A crocodile just gave birth, and everyone's confused.

That time an ostrich tried to kill Johnny Cash.

The mystery of the rat in the skull.

A rebellious traveler.

A 500-year-old man who died with his boots on.

Impoverished villagers make a very lucky find.

The village that really, really likes asparagus.

A mysterious ancient tomb in Turkey.

The Druids of Primrose Hill.

The first woman to swim the English Channel.

The Society of American Widows.

Photos of ordinary life in 19th century China.

A prehistoric cave carved by humans.

Some unusual underground ruins.

When "it don't" was proper English.

The midwife who identified "milk sickness."

Is it a ghost?  Or carbon monoxide?

History's largest naval showdown.

A strange encounter on a train.

Octopuses and the Cuban Missile Crisis.

What the Vikings ate.

The downhill slide of a former football hero.

Napoleon's son had quite a cradle.

The Stillwell Murder.

Accept it, guys, there's no such thing as a genuine vampire hunting kit.

Iceland's oldest known drawing.

That's all for this week!  See you on Monday, when we'll visit a haunted bungalow in India.  In the meantime, here's Alla Francesca.

6 comments:

  1. Excellent articles again. I especially enjoyed the pictures of nineteenth century China (I have an interest in 1850s-'60s China (the Taiping Rebellion, etc.)). Another interest is the Orient Express (the two connected only by 'orient', I think). I am glad that another attempt is being made to get it going. I hope this one lasts. The story of feeding the British MPs reminded me of a skit of the radio troupe The Royal Canadian Air Farce, in which they poked fun at politicians who visit the 'House of Commons Cafeteria'... And the asparagus... It warms the heart to see people so much behind their local product - and grown there since the eighteenth century. (By the way, the "micro-climate" of the Vale of Evesham made me think of a recent discovery I made: a future link-dump might include a story about real English tea - tea grown in England, on Lord Falmouth's estate at Tregothnan.)

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    1. I had never heard of Tregothnan. What a beautiful place! I'd love to be able to have tea there.

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    2. I first read of it in one of a series of very well researched and written books on English country houses. The discovery that they are actually growing tea there is a new one for me.

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    3. What was the series called? I'd love to read those books.

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    4. The first five were in a specific series: "English Country Houses", with the volumes being "Caroline" (Hill and Cornforth), "Baroque" (James Lee-Milne), "Early Georgian" (Christopher Hussey), "Mid-Georgian" (Christopher Hussey), "Late Georgian" (Christopher Hussey). These were followed by three that were more in the spirit of the series, rather than actually part of it: "The Victorian Country House" by Mark Girouard, and "The Last Country Houses" by Clive Aslet. John Martin Robinson wrote the final (so far) volume almost as a rebuttal to Aslet's: "The Latest Country Houses", showing that the country house, its construction and even its lifestyle flourished after the Second World War. All are very well written, scholarly (especially the first five) and informative, well illustrated and, except for the last, with many floor plans.

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