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| "The Witches' Cove," Follower of Jan Mandijn |
Welcome to this week's Link Dump!
The Strange Company staffers are getting ready for Easter!
My favorite historical mystery: What the hell happened to the sons of Edward IV? (I recently read a terrific new book, "The Princes in the Tower: Solving History's Greatest Cold Case." If you have any interest in the subject, it's highly recommended.)
Witchcraft in North Wales.
Folklore of the Wise Men of Gotham.
The spy who saved the Louvre from Hitler.
Easter drama in the streets of Stepney.
History's worst bridge disasters.
The funeral Mutes.
Nabokov's "Homeric retching."
A British 1930 train carriage was found buried in Belgium, and people have questions.
The "greatest bassist in history" is a woman you've probably never heard of.
A letter between two 19th century female activists.
According to DNA testing, Beethoven wasn't very musical, which tells a lot about the value of DNA testing.
When Elizabethan London panicked over fencing.
How the Siege of Vienna gave us the croissant.
Prisoners and embroidery.
The old "unwritten law" defense.
The saga of the stolen ruby slippers now comes with a side order of revenge porn.
An early female movie projectionist.
A typical "skip bombing" mission in WWII.
An early 19th century false imprisonment case.
An infamous female executioner.
Why clocks go forward in the UK.
A brief history of British acid attacks.
A look at Darwin's personal library.
A look at 18th century umbrellas.
The UK House of Lord's "scribbled books."
Language is probably much, much older than we thought.
Can we "feel the future?"
A recently-uncovered ancient Egyptian tomb.
The lost lizard city of Los Angeles. (Although I can vouch for the fact that if you go into many areas of L.A., you wonder if it was all that lost.)
So, a Chinese man who said he was the younger brother of Jesus started a civil war...
The cat who got cheated out of an inheritance.
Political apocalypses in Victorian Britain.
That's all for this week! See you on Monday, when we'll look at a Navy officer's odd disappearance. In the meantime, bring on the elephant orchestras!
Now I'll have to buy the book about the princes in the Tower. Thanks for letting us in on that. I'll be interested to read what its theory is. The story of Miss Valland is a good one; I like reading about the unknown heroes. As for the croissant, the article leaves out many of the details I've read of; they may be apocryphal but maybe not. I'd read that because of the bombardments during the Siege of Vienna, many people took to living and working in cellars. Bakers were no exception. One day, some of them heard sounds of digging through the earth. They reported it to army officers who investigated, and realised it was Turks tunnelling into the city. The tunnels were counter-mined and the attempt to burrow into Vienna thwarted. To commemorate the bakers' alertness, the emperor had them bake a pastry in the shape of crescent moons. A later Austrian princess, Marie Antonia, liked them and other Austrian pastries so much that she brought her chef to Paris when she married the French king and became Marie Antoinette. They caught on in Paris, too.
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